Guns of October
by Soul Reaver
Summary: In 2141 an ACME detective joins the US Army and is shipped off with Army Corps Africa in order to fight off a Biohazard outbreak in North Africa... Now complete.
1. Desert Sands and Memories

Desert Sands and Memories  
  
Disclaimer/Author's Note: I do not own the Where on Earth is Carmen Sandiego or Rupert franchises and the character Andi Ryvers was created by Carmine in a great fic called Everywhere. The character Martin Gallatin is my creation.  
  
The sound of shelling is muted, but still audible, for we are approximately six kilometers from the front line. The line to the cookhouse would be long by any standards, but not to ours. Of the 150 men that marched off fifteen days earlier, eighty remain. We were lucky at first, aside from the occasional casualty from a raid or the occasional KIA from a probing attack, the front was quiet. Then two nights ago a massive barrage from enemy lines landed in our sector, costing us many dead and wounded. Of the one hundred fifty men, seventy men of Baker Company, 15th Light Infantry Division, Army Corps Africa, are either dead or languishing in hospitals to the rear because of the barrage.  
  
The desert sun is kept out by the shade of the tarps around the kitchen, but not the heat or a good portion of the blowing sand. Still, good hot food originally intended for 150 soldiers, is now going to eighty men. The mess sergeant was initially adamant saying, "This food is for the whole of Baker Company, I cannot give almost double rations to eighty soldiers."  
  
"We are Baker Company." Corporal Kaczynski "Kat" Stanislaus, a hefty fellow from Geneva, Switzerland, and a good friend of mine replies. He is a mustached fellow of about twenty-five and what we in the army call a career corporal, a man who is comfortable with his station and does not nor will not put on that third chevron.  
  
Sergeant Krassau is adamant at first, then reluctantly he puts an extra helping of a hearty beef stew, potatoes and a large ration loaf on Stanislaus' mess tin. I grin to myself as my own ample helping is heaped into my mess tin. Kat joins me as we fill our cups with strong, steaming coffee and sit down at one of the large picnic tables.  
  
"These certainly are fine pickings after fifteen days of field rations." Kat remarks.  
  
James Fressan, a wiry curly haired youth of eighteen, Jay Wiersbowski a stocky little fellow from New York, and "Pilgrim" a slender fellow with black, oily hair and a pragmatist's air about him. These three enlisted with me a year earlier from the same ACME field office in San Francisco. Altogether there are about twenty ACME detectives I know personally that are serving with me during this war.  
  
"Indeed." I reply, placing my sand brown forage cap on my belt, "Not nearly as good as the time you scrounged up those five lobsters in Salerno, very fine dining before going to El Agheila."  
  
"That was over six months ago." Fressan remarks.  
  
"I swear they're trying to make me puke with this stuff." Wiersbowski replies.  
  
"Maybe Pilgrim can use the radio shed to hatch chickens in, yeah." Fressan remarks.  
  
"Ducks in the latrines, why not? Sweet little ducklings. We can fatten them up with jam from your filthy feet." Pilgrim jokes back.  
  
"You dirty pig." Wiersbowski snaps back.  
  
"Why, what's wrong. In the morning they'd feed on Fressan's toe jam."  
  
Grim soldier's humor, keeps one operating under the difficult conditions that fighting in the conditions the desert imposes upon us. There are three secrets to good morale for a soldier, good food, adequate sleep and the sweetest thing one can ever hear.  
  
"Mail call!" a darkly tanned corporal calls out as the supply truck pulls up to the field kitchen near where our barracks are set.  
  
"Shapiro." He calls out.  
  
"Garland."  
  
Sergeant McCron, second platoon, fifth squad's squad leader replies, "He's in the hospital."  
  
"Bronsky?"  
  
"Here." Corporal Bronsky, another friend and definitely almost as easy going as a career corporal can go.  
  
"Gallatin."  
  
At the sound of my name, I stand up and receive a couple of letters. Doubled rations, a cup of coffee that isn't watery and made with recycled grounds, and now a letter home all equal a splendid day in my book. Coupled of course with the fact that I am alive, and can now enjoy my first decent shower in days is that one of the two letters is one I've waited for quite some time. This goes without saying any mail is better than no mail at all.  
  
"From Andi?" Kat says, looking over my shoulder. I shoot him a sideway glance that says I want a little privacy.  
  
"I don't need to read the return address to find out who wrote you. I can tell by the way you perk up when you hear your name at roll call, and when she's the author you start beaming like a beacon." Kat grins, putting walking me back to the table.  
  
"Aren't you gonna read it?" Wiersbowski asks.  
  
"Not yet. Let me finish this food first." I reply.  
  
"I think what our British friend; Gallatin is saying is he'd rather have a little privacy to read it." Bronsky jokes, blowing smoke from a cigarette. He is a little smaller than Kat, taller, but with that same languid and easy going demeanor that characterizes the Swiss career corporal.  
  
"She better not be talking about those hamsters, it makes me hungry just thinking about it." Pilgrim replies. We all have grown used to this, ever since the time Pilgrim was trapped behind an enemy counterattack and had to survive by killing and eating mice for three days before we could attack with reinforcements from the 27th Armored Division. Somehow he's developed a taste for rodents.  
  
"Pilgrim, I doubt Andi would appreciate you going into her house and making a meal of her hamsters." I reply.  
  
"Disappointed Pilgrim?" Fressan laughs as he walks up to use the latrine, but instead, tripping and falling over a gas mask that someone left on the ground.  
  
"About the only time we use those are whenever Fressan farts in an enclosed space." Pilgrim cracks.  
  
"Ha ha ha ha." Fressan replies sarcastically and dusts himself off.  
  
I place my forage cap atop me head, gather my gear and rifle, and walk off to the barracks, another large tent, really with several cots inside. But in the center are the satellite phones which we are permitted to use. Kat follows after me.  
  
"Gonna call Andi?" he asks.  
  
I nod in reply. Kat is as genuine a friend as one can ask for, all the others I consider my friends as well, but Kat is that good combination of big brother, NCO, friend, and mentor. "She must be very special to you my friend." Kat continues.  
  
The other piece of mail I receive is a quick postcard from Zack and Ivy, a picture of the Swiss Alps, "It should be snowing any day now back home." Kat muses.  
  
"It's almost Andi's favorite season, she loves winter. I'm the exact opposite." I reply.  
  
"And is she in Switzerland." Kat asks.  
  
"No, she's back home in Boston. But a couple of my old colleagues from ACME are there." I reply.  
  
"Curious, an ACME braintrust in the army, what a combination." Kat remarks, if he thinks ACME detectives are all brains and no muscle he hasn't run into Ivy.  
  
"Hey Wiersbowski, Pilgrim, and Fressan are ACME detectives." I protest.  
  
"Nothing against ACME sleuths, but I never imagined independent and smart thinkers as making good soldiers." Kat replies as we walk into the barracks.  
  
Still carrying my rucksack, rifle, and gear I walk to the satellite phone, punch in a number I know by heart and await. Three rings later brings me an answer, "Hi Miss Ryvers, is Andi home?" I ask, Kat's grin says 'you sound like a sophomore at his first high school dance' as I wait.  
  
"Andrea! Come here, it's Martin." I hear over the phone.  
  
"Coming mom!" I hear in reply.  
  
"Martin? How are you?" I hear.  
  
I can't help but smile, despite being weary from having humped six kilometers back from the trenches and being weighed down by my rifle and gear which I haven't put down yet. "I'm just fine Andi." I reply, saying the first thing that comes to mind, "God it's great to hear your voice again."  
  
As I speak to her, I am instantly transferred back to a fantasy world of memories that do not entail trench digging, advancing without pause, or facing swarms of the living dead across the no man's land. In my mind's eye I can see Andi on the other side of the line. I can see her slender frame resting against a table, her petite build, the warmth in those gray eyes and the light reflecting off her chestnut brown hair.  
  
"How's Rhett Garland's doing." Andi says. Rhett Garland, whom two days ago was wounded in action manning his 3.7 cm anti-tank gun, he was an old friend of Andi and Ivy that the latter went through ACME training with.  
  
"He's wounded." I say, being caught flatfooted, "But not badly, he's in the hospital to the rear. He should be just fine."  
  
My last sentence was a flat out lie if I ever told one. The second one I'm not to sure about. "In fact I'll go over and see if he's alright." I continue on.  
  
After I hang up the phone I say, "Kat, I'm going to the field hospital to check on Garland."  
  
"Good," says another voice, Pilgrim, "I'm going with you."  
  
Both of us gather up our packs, place our helmets on our web gear, don our forage caps and sling our rifles. We walk about half a kilometer when a sympathetic truck driver offers us a ride to the hospital.  
  
We find Rhett Garland at a hospital bed, and he is not in good shape. His face is ashen and his eyes have withdrawn into his head. A noticeable stump can be seen, as one leg has been amputated at the knee. "Have either of you fellas found my watch?" he asks weakly, his Texas twang still present. When he was unconscious, someone light fingered his watch.  
  
"No Rhett, we haven't." I reply.  
  
"Remember I told you no man should carry as good a watch as that." Pilgrim says as I elbow him in the rib cage. Pilgrim is a little insincere, and speaks his mind a little too much. What is the point of arguing over a watch anyway, at any point it is highly unlikely Garland is going to leave this place alive. Pilgrim stalks off outside the hospital to go smoke a cigarette as I stand vigil beside Garland's bed.  
  
He is feverish, sweating, and shivering, "You must eat to regain your strength."  
  
"I wanted to be head forester when I got out. But I won't be able to do that now. What's the use?" he says.  
  
"They have splendid artificial limbs now, they'll attach one to you as soon as you're better." I reply, the atmosphere, a mixture of pus, sweat, carbolic, and gangrene is making me ill.  
  
A group of doctors is milling amongst the beds, selecting those most fit for travel to be sent to hospitals in Sicily and Italy, they pass Rhett's bed without even looking down. "Don't worry, maybe next time." I reply.  
  
"You'll write my mamma if I don't make it back, right?" Rhett asks. The look in his eyes is that of a man who has given up. His poor mother is going to be devastated if he dies.  
  
His mother was a rotund, brunette woman with graying streaks in her hair. She had the least composure of all the mothers at No. 4 Barracks, Fort Jackson, South Carolina, where we finished advanced infantry training and where a chosen number of us had been chosen to be one of "The Africans", soldiers sent to Army Corps Africa, instead of being shipped of to the hellish house to house fighting that Dyson City, located on a relatively new island on the North Atlantic, was being fought. When she learned Rhett was in my unit she said, "Please tell me you'll look after Rhett."  
  
I replied that I would, but how can a man look after another in a combat zone, it simply cannot be done. Rhett had been part of a four man crew manning a 3.7 cm anti-tank gun, driving off a massive assault by enemy arachnids when a Gollum sniper shot him in the knee. The quarrel that buried itself deep into flesh, muscle and bone had fragmented into several pieces that made individual removal almost impossible.  
  
"Now, now, don't talk like that." I say calmly, "It's only because of the amputation that you feel this way. Get plenty to eat and plenty of rest and you'll be fine."  
  
Even as I say this, I can see this won't be so. The ashen tone of Rhett's skin shows that death is claiming him from inside out. His breathing begins to become more labored, "Gallatin, please write my mamma, tell her I died like a man."  
  
These are the man's last words before he fades. "Orderly!" I shout into the hospital, "Bed 2126, Amputated knee!" I shout as I see Rhett Garland fading away quickly.  
  
The world ought to come up to him and say "This is Rhett Garland, nineteen and a half years old, he shouldn't have to die!"  
  
Even as I call for the orderly, I can see it is too late. "There are at least five amputated knees in this hospital." A balding, overworked and stressed hospital orderly replies, as he walks up to me and checks Rhett's bed.  
  
"He's gone." The man replies, summoning two stretcher bearers with a body bag. I remove one of Garland's dog tags, stuffing it in my pocket, and collect his few belongings. I walk out of the hospital, not wishing to stay in the stifling atmosphere within as well as not looking at a dying man once known as PFC Rhett Garland, United Systems Army.  
  
Pilgrim hitches us a ride on another truck and as we ride back to our billet I say nothing. The bouncing of the vehicle and my already exhausted mind lull me to sleep and I lean against a supply crate full of hand grenades and sleep.  
  
Sleep for me brings me into a lot of things, sometimes it brings me nightmares of the frontlines, or of that vicious raid at El Agheila we repulsed, other times it brings to mind a pleasant fantasy world that takes me far and away from the sand and heat of the desert war.  
  
It brings me to a pleasant pre-war world this time around. I'm sitting at coffee shop of a book store in Boston, where I decide to spend some vacation time after a case. I am dividing my time between Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and looking around for my date. It's a blind date, one that Ivy set me up for a week ago when she heard I was spending two weeks in Boston after cracking a VILE art theft scheme there. I have no bloody idea as to who I'm meeting, I only know to be sitting at a particular table closest to the fiction section.  
  
About a half hour passes, by my watch, 8:30 PM, that's when she's supposed to show up. I see her then, a slender, petite frame, standing about an inch or so shorter than me. I see a pair of gray eyes scanning the tables, looking for my table. Her shoulder length brown hair piles nicely over that purple turtleneck she's wearing. She is obviously comfortable with the fall weather where I'm already wearing a leather jacket over a long sleeved collared shirt.  
  
"Is this seat taken?" she asks.  
  
"No, it isn't." I reply, putting my book away.  
  
"You're English?" she asks.  
  
"I'm from a small country town called Nutwood Forest." I reply, hoping the name of my little town doesn't sound too ridiculous.  
  
She grins at me, "You must be my date then."  
  
"Do you know anyone named Ivy Darren?" I ask.  
  
"She's the one who told me you'd be here." Andi replies, then noticing my book she asks, "You ever read any more of Verne?"  
  
"I just got into his work." I reply, always happy to have another reader to talk to, "Perhaps you'd like to talk about it over a cup of coffee. My treat."  
  
And so this whole two year relationship began over a cup of coffee and a novel. About then I awaken, blinking sleep from my eyes and finding myself out by our billet as Pilgrim shakes me awake. We say our thanks to the truck driver and set down our packs, rifles, and web gear next to our cots.  
  
I strip off my uniform blouse, seeing two gray bugs crawl out from it. Lice from the front lines, I have in mind an idea to visit the delousing station in a moment. Pilgrim and I divide Garland's clothing between us. I get two faded sand brown uniform blouses and a belt, where Pilgrim gets two sets of trousers. We divide the socks and undershirts between us, waste not want not is the name of the game in this theater of operation. Kat goes in and distributes other gear items to the rest of us. Wiersbowski comes away with Rhett's canteen, Fressan gets an extra forage cap, Bronsky comes away with a Bowie knife, and Kat a sharpened spade. I take the spare blanket at the bottom of the pack.  
  
As I look around the barracks, I notice we all resemble miners and coal diggers rather than soldiers. I walk to the nearest shower, and watch as the water rinses the filth from my skin. Toweling off, I throw on my undershirt and trousers and walk off to my cot. With the blousing of our trousers, and the great drainpipes of our boots we resemble hulking giants in uniform. Stripping it away, wearing only shorts and undershirts, as we mostly spend our time wearing in the barracks behind the lines, we resemble civilians again, our narrow boyish frames would cause the casual observer to wonder how we ever manage to carry our packs.  
  
I lie in my cot, throwing my greatcoat and two spare blankets over myself and get ready to sleep. As I do so, I prepare to dream of my old life at ACME and Nutwood Forest. As well as Andi, who's picture I keep in my helmet at all times. 


	2. Reinforcements and Raids

Reinforcements and Raids  
  
Disclaimer: Read the disclaimer in the chapter before this one.  
  
We have been reinforced; seventy new billets have been filled. These new boys are in fresh desert brown uniforms. They're uniforms aren't faded to an almost whitish-yellow that ours have faded to after six months in the desert. They are children really, seventeen or eighteen years old, with uniforms that hang off their bodies like rags. No tailor has ever made a uniform to fit child-like measurements. I'm sure I must have appeared similar to them when I first joined Army Corps Africa.  
  
El Agheila seems a long and distant memory, Tripoli where Army Corps Africa came ashore six months earlier is even more so. It is at least fifty kilometers behind our frontlines. Ivy has recently written me saying that Zack is already registered with Selective Service and is over seventeen. She's worried, as are his parent's, that he will be drafted. If he does, I hope he winds up in the North Africa Theater, and becomes one of "The Africans" so I can at least attempt to take care of him. If not, I hope he ends up in the Pacific theater, clearing the islands of Biohazard infestation. If anything I hope the boy doesn't wind up in Dyson City or the rumored Europe operation. France, Germany, and the Low Countries are fighting a Biohazard outbreak of their own. Wherever he winds up, I hope he encounters a friendly and experienced old hand that will take care of him as Kat has done for me and the others.  
  
I hear the first rifle shots as Staff Sergeant Burton, Weapon's Platoon, an easy going hunter from Alaska, is helping our reinforcements sight their rifles. I scratch again at the lice that have been infesting my clothing. The delousing chemicals for our clothes have yet to be delivered so those of us from the front lines, and even the new recruits, suffer from the infestation to a varying degree. Kat, the old front hound that he is, with a nose for bad weather, good food, and soft duty, is already throwing on his fatigues and getting to the delousing station. I throw on my boots hastily and walk alongside him, donning my forage cap.  
  
"Do you think there are any delousing chemicals at the station?" I ask.  
  
"Hopefully, but I'll find some, wake Fressan and the others when we do find any." Kat says.  
  
At the delousing station, medics take our clothes and rinse them in the chemical we seek. Already I see Kat negotiating with a nurse for a quantity of the stuff. I already see several of the gray bugs lying dead on the surface of the soapy substance in the pan where our clothes are spread. Now it's time to lie in the delousing baths. They come in two varieties, the hot water or the cold water. I like the hot water delousing baths because they bring to mind memories of lying in a hot bath at home. I enjoy the sleepy feeling it brings about, the way it evaporates all cares in the world.  
  
The best feeling is climbing out of the delousing baths, I see several of the dead bugs floating in the warm water mixed in with delousing chemicals and as I go through the short rinse off shower I wrap my towel around my waist and find my clothes, folded and deloused, atop a bench.  
  
I wait for Kat outside the delousing station and see him walk out, carrying a jerry can full of the delousing chemical. We wake Fressan, Wiersbowski, Bronsky, and Pilgrim who all help us in pouring the jerry can's contents into a large pan. We all douse every piece of clothing we have into it and Kat saves the remainder of the jerry can to see if he can't trade it for anything else we might want or need.  
  
As the day wears on, rumors of another big offensive, aimed at taking Benghazi. We have already taken Agedabla with elements of the 9th Sicilian Infantry and 3rd Egyptian Armored Divisions. These rumors are being substantiated because of the seventy new reinforcements, the hasty weapons training these seventy men are receiving and the almost daily arrival of ammunition trucks to our position. It is now October, 2141, six months ago we arrived in Tripoli and reoccupied many of the Biohazard infected areas as well as reinforced the 9th Sicilian Infantry Division, 115th Libyan Infantry Division, and 3rd Egyptian Armored Division.  
  
We see a cloud of dust over the horizon, several half-tracks and tanks of the 27th Armored Division, reinforcing our position. We are sure our fearless leader General DeRutyer, Army Corps Africa, intends to use Agedabla as a springboard to retake Benghazi. Our original orders stated we must aid the Libyan, Egyptian, and Sicilian forces fighting to contain the spread of the Biohazard into Libya. DeRutyer, however, is deciding to take the offensive.  
  
There is an expectant and jubilant mood among several of the men in the barracks. Even some of the once dispirited Sicilians, who have billets close to where we are encamped, are in high spirits. They are hardy, weary men who had been fighting in an ever shrinking perimeter, to keep the Biohazard from spreading any farther into Libya. The tankers are especially happy, because they form the spearhead of our offensive. Those of us in the infantry often have to pick up the pace quite a bit in order to keep up. Several large 90mm anti-tank and 105mm howitzer guns are taking up positions a kilometer ahead of us.  
  
The next day we march off to the front lines, passing a column of Libyan infantry that were occupying our positions. Their uniforms are ragged and dirty, their faces covered with fine layers of dust and almost hidden under their helmets, they hunch forward under the weight of their gear.  
  
We settle into our trenches, and as we do so, we automatically become conscious of the ground, we take note of every shallow depression, every shell crater, every wadi in the dunes, every dried creek bed. We know these are great areas to take cover whenever we are under bombardment. We dig in and prepare for the offensive we are about to take part in.  
  
We have a four hour watch at the machinegun in my dugout. Wiersbowski, the Wraith gunner in our squad, holds his fully automatic 20mm Wraith cannon cradled across his knees as he naps in our dugout. Many pouches of 20 round magazines are worn on his web gear as well as two spare barrels in a tube across his back.  
  
Pilgrim awakens me from a shallow and light sleep at 0100 and I take my watch at the machinegun. My tired eyes scan the landscape, lit by the light of the full moon. The desert is far from the dreams of oasis and balmy tropical breezes that inspired many in our ranks to become one of "The Africans" it is extremely hot in the daytime, yet freezing cold at night. Out of the corner of my eye, I see a starburst flare. I shut my eyes, reopen them, and let them adjust. All of a sudden I can identify ogres creeping up towards our foxhole. I kick Pilgrim awake and he proceeds to wake the other soldiers in our dugout.  
  
I squeeze the trigger and let the MG 70 light machinegun do its dirty work. Almost as soon as I realize I've zipped through an entire belt of ammunition, the ogres are gone, either dead or retreated across the no- man's land. Fressan takes my place at the machinegun and I settle into the hazy and uneasy sleep common to the frontline soldier.  
  
I am awakened, as are we all, by the bursts of shells from our artillery just before dawn. I check my watch, 0200. The tanks speed forth, firing their own main guns toward the infested sections of Benghazi, barely visible in the distance. From our dugouts the infantry swarm out, advancing behind the tanks. The Sicilians fill in as our rear guard and I do not envy them in the least. They must be ever more vigilant for flanking attacks, delaying actions, or anything else that may come their way for if they fail, we will be cut off in Benghazi from our base in El Agheila.  
  
I run forth, as the tanks fire their main guns at forward enemy positions. The great metal behemoths are followed by mechanized infantry in their half tracks and with assault guns, a 75 mm anti-tank gun mounted atop the chassis of a tank with a little armored shield to protect the crew from frontal attack. We follow behind and are at enemy forward positions.  
  
Our patrol makes contact with a contingent of ogres and rifle fire begins again. The fighting starts to go hand to hand. Kat buries his sharpened entrenching tool into the neck of a huge ogre, sending black blood spurting from the ceratoid artery all over him and the desert sand. Wiersbowski fires a short burst of 20mm shells that rip an ogre in half. Several zombies lurch toward us. I drop to one knee, focus my sights and squeeze the trigger. I see Pilgrim bury his bayonet deep into a zombie's chest and kick it back out again from the corner of my eye. Bronsky fires bursts from his electric gun that burn down a pair of zombies that has crept in behind me. An ogre comes charging my way. I stand up, step sideways and bring the butt of my rifle down onto the side of its skull, caving it in. Almost as soon the ogres break contact, only to be ambushed by several Egyptian half- tracks up the road.  
  
Battle at night could almost be as beautiful as any illumination show ever created if it weren't so dangerous. Bursts of light from flares, Verey lights, and starburst shells light up the sky almost as bright as day. Tracer rounds from machinegun belts arc in a terrific and terrible display. Shell bursts from our anti-aircraft guns and rockets and missiles from our Predator gunships flying overhead add to the display.  
  
An energy orb explodes behind me, and as soon as I hear it coming, I dive for the ground and roll away from it. Sand explodes in a geyser and covers us over. My helmet falls from my head as the flash from an illumination round explodes over my head. In it's brief flash I see Andi's smiling face, in that lovely green dress that I had taken her to her high school prom in.  
  
I feel a hand behind me and hear Kat yelling, "Get up! We're still advancing. Are you alright?"  
  
I shakily recover my helmet and place it atop my head, I grab my rifle and feed a new clip into the magazine and join the attack which has already reached Benghazi's outskirts. The tanks are firing shells into buildings ahead of us as well as firing their .50 caliber machineguns at expected hiding places. We hunker down behind the tanks, the advance slowing through the narrow streets of Benghazi's casbah.  
  
A Gollum pops out from a manhole cover twenty meters away from me. Kat shoots it right in the face and I toss a grenade down the tunnel after it. I can hear scurrying feet and then a loud boom. The Gollum must have had some kind of help. We are sent forth to clear a house to our front just as several D9 Armored bulldozers drive up to smash down walls.  
  
I am tasked with watching the squad's back as Kat kicks the door down with Sergeant McCron behind him. McCron throws a grenade into the room and is rewarded by hearing the thud of a body hitting the ground. A dead zombie falls out of the kitchen and into the foyer. A zombified Egyptian soldier comes towards me, his sand brown uniform ragged, the stench of decay and death coming off him in waves. I level my rifle and squeeze of two shots to his chest and one to his head. He falls.  
  
I check the corpse for ammunition, finding a full magazine pouch as well as a 9mm pistol and two fifteen round clips. This find is lucky for the next close in fight I get into, I have a suitable firearm. I put the dead man's magazine pouches and pistol on my web gear and follow the rest of my squad.  
  
We have secured our objective and more. The other half of Benghazi remains, but that is to be done later. Tired, we hunker down in improvised billets and await the next attack. I make sure the pistol I acquired is clean and place it on a lanyard attached to my web gear, the safety is on and a round is chambered in case we are attacked tonight.  
  
A curious yet terrible sight follows our advance at all times. From refugee camps to the rear of our positions, long columns of displaced persons follow. One toothless old woman pokes among piles of dead zombies we had killed yesterday. She does this as Kat soaks them with a can of petroleum. She finds one body, stops, and then falls to her knees, wailing in agony. We cannot set the pyre alight until she moves away, and she refuses. An Egyptian soldier comes to our position and explains that the body of this zombie is her son's and she wants to bury it. We are under orders to destroy all corpses created by the plague. The old woman is insistent but the Egyptian persuades her that we have to follow our order. She breaks away, wailing as Kat lights the pile ablaze.  
  
We go out on patrol, now at the fringes of our territory, the eastern outskirts of Benghazi. Kat, Wiersbowski, Pilgrim, and myself are the more experienced members of this patrol. Sergeant McCron with Fressan on point and Bronsky operating his radio are to the front. Wiersbowski is further to the rear of the formation, watching our backs.  
  
The replacement in front of me is obviously inexperienced, for I frequently have to push down on his shoulders to keep him low. He is an ashen, terrified youth of seventeen at the youngest and eighteen at the very oldest. There are about five other replacements we have to keep an eye on, all young privates fresh out of Basic and sent to the Replacement Depots in Tunis and El Agheila, they will need watching.  
  
We try to teach them what we know, such as to listen for smaller energy spheres with their insect like hum as opposed to the larger spheres which can be heard long before impact, how to time grenades so they explode a half second before hitting the ground, how to take cover during a barrage or mimic a dead man when overrun in an attack. They listen intently, but when the carnage starts again they revert to their old ways.  
  
An energy sphere explodes near our position; the enemy is attempting to cover his retreat from Benghazi with delaying actions and mines. The more experienced of us duck for cover, almost hugging the ground. I crouch low; the replacement in front of me is lying in the middle of the street, regarding me with wide, terrified eyes. I beckon the child closer, at first he refuses to budge, and then another explosion makes him crawl quickly to the relative safety of the alley I have taken refuge in. I place his helmet, which has fallen from his head, atop his rear end. I do not do this as a joke or to humiliate him, I do this because this is the highest part of his body and one would not like to take a quarrel through the rear end. The wounds there are not generally fatal but one will spend a considerable amount of time on one's stomach and one will develop a limp from such a position.  
  
Then suddenly several ogres and zombies jump the squad from behind. Wiersbowski sees them and flattens them with a burst from his Wraith cannon. Kat, who is our MG 70 gunner, immediately sets up his weapon and fires off bursts of ammunition at our attackers. I join in returning fire, there's no shortage of targets. It is not long before the creatures start to get closer and I am infinitely happy that I found that pistol. I switch the safety off and shoot a zombie in the face less than ten meters from my position. At the same time I yell for the replacement crouched next to me to man his weapon. The boy raises his rifle and shoots, managing to hit an ogre that was rushing at him with two shots to the chest.  
  
"Aim for their heads, you waste less ammo that way!" I shout as I pull a pin from a grenade, time it and throw it at the feet of a pair of Gollums that are creeping towards Wiersbowski from the alley across the street. The grenade explodes, throwing both creatures airborne and into the alley walls.  
  
"Fall back!" Sergeant McCron shouts.  
  
This means we're going to have to find our own ways back to our lines which are about four kilometers away. Creeping and running through the rabbit warren of streets and back alleys I become separated.  
  
I kick down a door, pistol in hand, rifle slung, creeping slowly through the remains of a school house. A zombified school teacher comes out from a desk, or rather half of her body, for her legs have been blasted away. She grabs at my ankle and tries to bite through my boot. I stomp down with one foot, crushing her skull and run out of the building.  
  
For what seems like an eternity I am lost. I am certain that I will die in a far away from all I know and love in an African city. I take stock of my ammunition, one of my four pouches is empty, the other has two of the four magazines it carries left, and the other two are full to capacity with two sixty round clips a piece. My pistol has one magazine with ten of its fifteen rounds remaining. Not good, if I have to fight my way back, which I probably will.  
  
I hope Kat has made it back, because my farewell letters to my family and to Andi are in his possession. For all the six months of experience I have, I am terrified, alone, and lost. I remove my helmet, taking my picture of Andi out of it, that picture is less than seven months old. Before I shipped out to Africa, I took her to her high school prom. It was a heady experience for a private fresh out of Basic, we had our picture taken one of me in my dress uniform and Andi in her prom dress that picture is folded in the outer pocket of my field pack. It is then that experience takes over; I place my helmet atop my head, picture still inside, and continue my lonely trek back to our lines.  
  
Ahead I see two soldiers crouched behind a car with an MG 70 machinegun. I walk slowly towards their position only to hear bullets flying by my head. In my confusion and fear I failed to properly identify myself. "Thunder!" one of the soldiers shouts our code word, it's Kat.  
  
"Flash! You fucking idiots you nearly killed me!" I shout back.  
  
"Gallatin? Is that you?" Wiersbowski shouts, "We thought you were dead."  
  
"Yeah it's me you morons!" I shout back, angry and relieved at the same time. I join them at their position.  
  
"Do you have any idea where our lines are?" I ask.  
  
"What?" Kat asks.  
  
"I said do you have any idea where our lines are?" I reply.  
  
"I can't hear a damn word your saying, fucking Wiersbowski fired off that thing too close to my head!" Kat replies, pointing at Wiersbowski's Wraith cannon.  
  
Wiersbowski looks around and says, "Wait, our lines are about two klicks from that billboard."  
  
"Let's get to it then." I reply.  
  
"Huh?" Kat asks.  
  
"Let's go!" I reply and point towards our lines.  
  
I go out first with Wiersbowski watching my back. Then Wiersbowski runs toward the next point of cover. Kat covers us both and then he runs over with us covering him. We leap frog like this for what seems like an immeasurably long time, actually engaging a band of ogres that was creeping towards our lines in a running gunfight a klick from friendly territory.  
  
Running and shooting we manage to reach friendly lines where Kat goes to the infirmary to get his hearing checked. Two of our new recruits failed to make it back. Fressan comes up to me and says, "Did you hear about Josha?"  
  
"No? What about him?" I ask. I remember a somewhat geeky kid that was obsessed with Ivy and who enlisted with us as he talks. He was Pilgrim's room mate, as well as his good friend, at ACME.  
  
"He was a grenadier with the 91st Armored Division; he was killed at El Mechili yesterday." Fressan says. El Mechili was a secondary objective attacked simultaneously with the 115th Libyan Infantry supported by Josha's unit, the 91st Armored Division.  
  
I see Pilgrim sitting on a pile of sandbags. He hands me my mail, "I didn't think you made it back."  
  
"I heard about Josha. Sorry." I reply.  
  
"He was driving his supply truck to the front lines, with shells and water for the artillery gunners. It was supposed to be a safe job." Pilgrim says, flatly, "The kid tried so hard to stay level during Basic, when the drill sergeant was always harping on him. He managed to graduate and be a soldier, and then what does he do. He's driving down the road and a Gollum with one of those crude energy sphere tubes shoots a grenade through his engine, blows up the fuel tank and kills him."  
  
"There are no safe jobs in the army." I reply.  
  
I open my mail; today is October 11, my birthday. So far the day has brought me the gift of nearly getting killed by both the enemy and my friends, and the death of a colleague and a friend. I distinctly remember Josha always asking me for advice on how to approach Ivy on any given day. I pitied and later befriended the kid almost a year ago, and now he's dead.  
  
My mail consists of a birthday card from my family, and one from Andi. I turn my attention to it, savoring every word. Andi tells me about her sister Brianna's 7th Grade school play and how she's gotten the lead role in Wind and the Willows, about how Gavin's doing in college, and she jokingly asks if Pilgrim still wants to eat her hamsters. Mom and Dad and my little brothers are talking about how Paul Bevel, the son of the owner of the Rose and Crown pub on Main Street just got drafted, that Nutwood just had an emergency shelter built, and how Dad's vegetable garden has been fairing. Those emergency shelters are a combination of medical clinic, evacuation point, and defense center. They don't always fair well in these biohazards. We have come across many a shelter that's been overrun and the sight is always the same, bodies lying about the floor, barricades torn down, zombies lurching about in a gruesome feast.  
  
It's as if the world they live in and the one I inhabit now are two separate worlds. The other is impossibly far away and these letters are a portal into the far off world. Gazing at the picture in my helmet is like staring at a moment, a much happier moment, frozen in time. I stare at it until nightfall, wanting to return to the happier moments and not even daring to dream of when I may have them again. 


	3. Through the Looking Glass

Through the Looking Glass  
  
Author's Note/Disclaimer: Same as before. Any references to the Colonial Legion, read my ongoing fic, Legio Patria Nostra.  
  
We are gearing up for yet another advance. New replacements have arrived, weapons are being checked, and supplies are being rushed to the front from depots in El Agheila and Tunisia. We are almost halfway through Libya and our belief is Egypt will lay open before us for Christmas. The Egyptian soldiers of the 3rd Egyptian Armored are especially eager, for their home state has been hit hard. A line less than twelve kilometers from the Nile is being held at a great cost by Egyptian, Syrian, Saudi and Israeli ground forces.  
  
We have been reinforced by the 13e DBLE, the 13th Half Brigade of the Colonial Legion, men who have been fighting this Biohazard in our Interstellar Colonies for nearly two years. They are hard, jaundiced veterans, even more so than we are. They are fatalistic; I see two of them taping their blood types to their boots before going into action. After facing nearly two years of overwhelming defeats despite valiant stands, anyone would become a fatalist.  
  
Two of them are teaching Wiersbowski how to shoot his Wraith cannon from the hip. Their shooting instructor is instructing an intensive marksmanship course, together with Sergeant Burton. Their armorer has just created a better grip for Wiersbowski's Wraith cannon.  
  
As for the rest of us, we receive an impromptu course in close quarter fighting, for the fighting at Derna, our next objective, is expected to be fierce. Also a team of Special Forces soldiers is among our ranks, teaching us how to conduct reconnaissance raids. As light infantry, this is one of our missions and the Special Forces are experts in this art of warfare.  
  
Build up phases are almost like being rotated off the frontlines except with the Special Forces and Legionnaires training us in what they think is an overlooked part of our mission, we are busier than usual.  
  
I lay uneasily against the wall of the bunker as I write a letter home. I know Kat is still holding on to my two farewell letters should I not make it back from this mission. One of the Special Forces men, Sergeant First Class Seitz taps me on my shoulder and I place the unfinished letter to Andi in my pack. I carry only my rifle, a bandolier with six extra magazines, and my holstered pistol, attached on a lanyard. Wiersbowski carries four grenades, and two four 20 round magazine pouches for his Wraith cannon. I join Wiersbowski, Pilgrim, Kat and Bronsky as Seitz lines us up, checks over our gear, which are very light loads as our mission is reconnaissance and observation, we are to break contact if we are discovered. Sergeant Seitz has us remove any unit identification patches from our blouses. We remove the prominent shield bearing a red 15 against a white background with a knight's helmet and crossed lances below it, the crest of the 15th Light Infantry Division from one sleeve, the USM seal from the other sleeve and any other unit markings.  
  
We creep silently past the wire of our encampments, the sounds of the artillery rumbling off their nightly rounds at known enemy positions. We hear an OA-17 observation aircraft flying overhead, spotting targets for the artillery. Our scientists want live specimens of the creatures we fight in order to better study them and the effects of the virus.  
  
We pass through the no man's land and Wiersbowski trips over the outstretched hand of the corpse of an Egyptian soldier. I look down and even by the moonlight I can see definite signs of mutilation. Sergeant Seitz removes the one of the man's dog tags and stuffs it in a pocket. I feel horror and revulsion as well as a grim resolve, if I'm ever trapped behind enemy lines, the last round in my pistol is going into my head, no questions asked.  
  
Zombies are relatively easy to capture and ogres have a tendency to abandon their wounded during an attack so we have several prisoners of this type. Gollums are rarer finds because they usually kill their wounded to prevent capture. Apparently our superiors deem that these creatures must have some kind of intelligence greater than the other biohazard mutations. In any case we are supposed to capture one of these creatures.  
  
Sergeant Seitz gives us the signal to halt, he sees a lone Gollum trekking across the no-man's land, possibly to make a nuisance raid upon us. Throughout the campaign, Gollums sneak into our encampments, sniping individual soldiers with crude, telescope sighted weapons that fire barbed quarrels that are a nightmare to remove, strangling sleeping men, or stealing weapons.  
  
We flank around the creature with me and Wiersbowski cutting off its line of retreat. As it stalks through a wadi, Kat sneaks in at its flanks and then fires off a burst at its feet. With an alarmed 'gollum' in its throat it tries to retreat only to encounter Wiersbowski and I. Wiersbowski wrestles the creature for about five minutes, for such a stringy, flatfooted thing that resembles something from the pages of Tolkein it is surprisingly strong. All seems to have gone well after we have secured our prisoner and are heading back to our own lines when a barrage crashes across the no-man's land. I attempt to crawl towards a shallow wadi to my left but the concussion from a blast hits very close and I black out.  
  
As I slowly come the barrage is still going on. I duck in the shell crater, finding it a better refuge than none. I hear movement above me, and glance upward, it is a group of ogres with one or two Gollums mixed among them, no doubt forming a probing attack on our lines. I silently switch off the safety on my pistol, my hand pressed against the grip in case they spot me. I lie on one side, pretending to be dead. The enemy patrol passes and they come under heavy fire from mortars and machinegun nests at the edge of our lines. I see three ogres reduced from green skinned humanoids into scraps of flesh and bone as a mortar round detonates the explosives they were carrying. The probe is broken before it gets underway and I pull my pistol in case they take cover in my shell crater. A Gollum jumps in and upon seeing me alive is upon me and in seconds its long fingers are around my throat. I fire my pistol twice into its chest. The creature lets go and a gurgling and sucking sound can be heard from its wounds as I am sprayed with arterial blood.  
  
The creature keeps gurgling and sputtering, its life fading. As I lie in the shell crater, unable to move because a fierce artillery duel is still going on above my head, I watch in horrified fascination as I see how slowly it takes a creature to die. I cannot bring myself to kill it, though I have killed many times before in the last six months. The more I kill the further away from home I feel.  
  
Finally, starring into those lamp like eyes, watching red blood gush out over the black, leathery skin of the creature I find it in myself to go through the small pack it was carrying. I find small trinkets it has looted from both soldier and civilian alike. In the ragged pair of trousers it wears I discover a work visa, I have just killed Mahmud Al-Akhbar, a construction laborer from Derna. Before he was afflicted by this virus, Mahmud was just an ordinary man.  
  
Finally the Gollum that was Mahmud dies. For some insane reason I feel compelled to remember that name, despite the irrationality of the act. I take the ID card and stick it in my trouser pocket. As I look above the crater's lip, I can see the barrage has lifted, going back to the rear areas. I take my bearings from the rising sun, and by my watch have found out that I was gone for nearly twelve hours. I creep back towards our lines and when I reach visual distance I shout, "Thunder!"  
  
"Flash!" a sentry shouts.  
  
I make it back to my unit and Kat informs me that I was reported missing and believed dead. As soon as I make it back, my platoon sergeant, Staff Sergeant Keck, a mustachioed Southerner from Mississippi takes me over to where we have our satellite phone uplink ready. I make two calls, one to my family and the other to Andi, letting them know, to their great relief, I am still alive and to disregard any death notices.  
  
My thoughts drift back through the looking glass, were it not for Andi I would have lost my faith in the ideals of truth, beauty, freedom and love long before I joined the army. I do not intend to tell Kat and the others about my killing of Mahmud Al-Akhbar. The guilty feeling is overwhelmed by the feeling of gratitude that I am alive. I vow that I will cling to these ideals of truth, beauty, freedom and most importantly love despite all the chaos and death around me. I vow this as I go to sleep.  
  
I am awakened after dark by Pilgrim; I have guard duty at an observation post just overlooking our route into Derna. I can see the coastal Libyan city to the rear of the enemy lines as I scan the front with an infrared telescope. I look up at the stars, beautifully placed across a dark sky with a crescent moon. For a brief moment I am taken away from the vivid horrors and violence I witness daily in our rapid advance through Africa. Andi loved staring up at the stars from the roof of her house. Nutwood didn't have as many city lights as Boston, so Andi particularly loved it when she got to visit us for a whole summer, being able to gaze at the stars. Lying face up in a grass field just down the road from where I lived, we would stare up at the heavens and just talk. The stars also bring memories of a fairly passionate kiss I shared with her the night before I was sent to Sicily before my unit was sent to North Africa. The feeling of her warm lips, the sheltering embrace, and her eyes glistening with unshed tears of worry is what this sight also brings me. That kiss was all I could give in the way of reassurance. It has been little over six months since that day. That night was her high school prom; she shouldn't have been saddled with worrying about me. But this crisis in North Africa was calling me forth.  
  
I am brought back into reality by the realization that a crescent moon and less moonlight means more raids are likely. My observation post has a small squad radio I can use to contact other posts and the command post for any trouble I witness. There is also a Javelin 89mm anti-tank rocket launcher in an individual wooden packing crate by my feet. This is in case we get attacked by technicals, trucks with stolen .50 caliber machineguns or with small energy orb projectors mounted on them driven by Gollums or ogres. I open the crate and place the Javelin atop the lid beside my feet. It is a short, compact tube with a bulbous rocket propelled shaped explosive charge in the front and a flip up sight. It is perfect for knocking out giant scorpions or spiders and even better against technicals.  
  
I hear an engine and put the small infrared scope to my eye. I see a Toyota pickup truck with several Gollums riding in it. These technicals either do long range reconnaissance or nuisance raids. Its heading straight for my position, so I lift the Javelin, flip up the small fiber optic night vision sight, aim and fire. The charge explodes and blows the Gollum driver and passenger out the back window. Two secondary explosions of fuel and ammunition light up the night sky in a bright flash and the burning vehicle spins into a dune. Gunfire from up and down the trenches begins to sound; I see a machinegun nest to my right engaging a group of ogres trying to rush their position.  
  
I reload another grenade into the launcher from the six shells in the crate and flip down the optical sight. The night turns quiet again and lets me once again peer through the looking glass. Artillery rumbles behind me, smashing against enemy positions our reconnaissance has detected.  
  
For nearly six days we have bombarded Derna with artillery and air strikes, now we take positions and prepare to advance. The attack starts tomorrow morning, as the barrage continues rolling from forward to rear enemy positions. The tanks begin their movement and we follow close behind.  
  
The creatures are smart enough to have tank fighting squads left as either stay behind groups or integrated into their defenses. It is up to the infantry to stop their momentum before they can damage the tanks. The tanks fire round after round as they advance, crushing over dead and wounded zombies as they go.  
  
It is truly grotesque to lay eyes upon a zombie, they lurch about, inhuman smells and moans emanating from them, and the sight of the living or corpses induce their desire to feed. A line of zombies comes bursting between the tanks towards us. We open fire and I see Wiersbowski saw a trio of zombies in half with a burst of 20mm explosive rounds.  
  
Kat gets the machinegun firing in short bursts, conserving ammo. I have about 250 extra machinegun rounds in a pouch on my belt so I must stick close to Kat if he needs extra ammo. He rarely does. Using rifle and pistol I fight the zombie mob closing in on our ranks. Kat taps my helmet and I feed him the extra rounds. He has more belts in his pack so as he is shooting I open it up and feed him more.  
  
Both Pilgrim and Wiersbowski pull grenades and throw them. Pilgrim is by far the best, able to throw forty meters down range with Wiersbowski able to through thirty-seven meters. The grenades explode in the midst of zombie ranks, blowing the undead apart. Still those blown apart but not quite dead keep advancing. It takes so much to kill a zombie without shooting its head; the other effective ways to kill them is setting them on fire or blowing them apart. I see Wiersbowski slam another clip home and shoot in short controlled bursts. I pull my pistol and start shooting those getting closest to me. Fairly soon it becomes hand to hand with Wiersbowski pulling a spade and burying it in the neck of a zombie.  
  
Within minutes there are no zombies left, just broken bodies lying about the desert sands. The rapid advance into Derna gives us little time for thought. Our squad breaks into a shelter on the outskirts of the city. It is in shambles, no survivors remain. The building has several large rooms for medical treatment and numerous places for soldiers and police officer to defend the survivors. Kat sets up his machinegun at the back entrance. With Bronsky on point, Wiersbowski right behind him and me and Pilgrim lingering in the rear, we give Wiersbowski three extra grenades. Bronsky's electric gun sweeps across the lobby, where the desiccated corpses of three police officers lie sprawled in death around a downed barricade.  
  
"Thunder! Thunder or we will fire on you!" Bronsky shouts, aiming into the next room.  
  
No answer, just shuffling feet and an inhuman moan. Wiersbowski takes one of his grenades and times it. He throws it into the room and Bronsky follows a half second later with another. After two explosions, we wait for the smoke to clear. I see one of the police officers move and try to get to his feet. I shoot the zombified officer point blank with my rifle, splattering blood into my face.  
  
In the next room, even if it weren't violently torn apart by explosives, the scene is pure carnage. We see three dead zombies, killed by our grenades. We also see several dead patients, wounded by the zombie attacks that overwhelmed Derna six months ago. The room stinks of gangrene, death, and spilt chemicals lingering in the air.  
  
A Gollum leaps from a ceiling vent towards us and Bronsky barely has time to zap it with a fatal dose of electricity. The creature convulses for a couple of seconds in an expanding pool of blood before it dies.  
  
We hear a machinegun open up, Kat and two replacements he tasked with being his backup gunners must've spotted a group of creatures fleeing out the back. We continue our house clearing, with Pilgrim kicking down the door of a room only to be overpowered by the stink of several dead bodies piled inside. A zombie lurches inches from where he stands and Pilgrim shoots it at point blank range, obliterating its head.  
  
Wiersbowski shoots a burst into the pile of bodies, "You never know if they're zombies or not anymore."  
  
Another creature runs out then, a zombie, hunched over with red skin and breathing gaseous green fumes that are noxious. It bares long claws that it prepares to swoop into Bronsky just as Wiersbowski rips it apart with a short burst from the Wraith cannon. It keeps coming, pieces flying off, until Wiersbowski empties the entire clip of 20mm ammunition into it. Even after it falls, Bronsky puts a charge through it.  
  
Crimson heads are rarer zombie mutations but they are twice as deadly as normal zombies because of their claws, speed, and noxious breath. We announce the building is clear and a team of engineers with flamethrowers starts its own grisly work, destroying the bodies contaminated by the plague.  
  
Within four days, Derna falls to our advance. We advance at a breakneck speed, having gone from Tripoli to Derna in less than six months. We are close to the Egyptian frontier and are preparing to advance on Gazala and Tobruk.  
  
As we march forth yet again, towards Gazala we are reaching closer to Egypt. I continue to strengthen my resolve; despite the horrors I see I will remain steadfastly committed to truth, beauty, freedom and love. Yet I have changed greatly from the young idealistic Bohemian I was on the other side of the looking glass. The pastoral serenity of Nutwood forest, the beauty of Andi's smile and her welcoming embrace, and my old life at ACME are all through the looking glass. I wonder, will I return. For certain if I do return to the other side of the looking glass I will have been changed in some manner. As an ACME detective I didn't know what close quarter battle was, or how to take cover in a barrage, or even how to switch on and be aware of my animal instincts for they are all that keep me alive on the front.  
  
At our night encampment I watch as a supply truck with mail and reinforcements stops by with a water truck beside it. After receiving my mail and water ration I see a burial detail loading twenty black body bags of our casualties from four days of fighting at Derna. We receive ten reinforcements for them.  
  
These reinforcements often fail to listen to their animal instinct. Time and again I have seen them bunch up during artillery attacks only to be blown to bits. I am nineteen years old and I have seen nothing but death, destruction and mayhem for months. Will my ideals of truth, beauty, freedom and love hold value in my heart despite the brutality I live with. I pull my helmet from my head as I sit down on my field pack to read my latest letter. It's Andi again, it is one filled with worry and relief at the same time. I was on the casualty list as missing and presumed dead but the call I have six hours later was the most reassuring thing she had heard. I can see streaks in the ink where she must have been crying while writing this. I write a letter and as I wait in the mail queue the next day for outgoing mail I hope that I do not lose my faith in the Bohemian ideals I cherish so dearly under the baking desert sun. I peer tenderly at Andi's picture, gazing upon her smiling face, recapturing momentarily a lost moment through the looking glass. 


	4. Measure of a Coward

Measure of a Coward  
  
Disclaimer: Same as before.  
  
We sit in our foxholes at the front line when on duty at the observation posts and reside in temporary bunkers when not on duty. I read a letter from Andi I received a week ago, thanking me for having sent her a card on her birthday, reassuring me that it arrived from the North African desert on time. November 19, 2141 is today's date. I see several new recruits stepping of a five ton truck. They have the same appearance of all our green replacements, freshly issued desert uniforms that haven't bleached to a whitish yellow that the old hands of North Africa wear, web gear that hasn't faded to a dull green shade, fresh tan desert boots that haven't faded to a darker yellowish-white than our uniforms.  
  
We get two replacements in our squad, one of them; Specialist Walter J. Pierce was a medic in Dyson City, wounded, and sent to our front after his recovery. The other is Private Michael Morerro. I speak with them briefly and point them off to where Sergeant McCron is.  
  
I turn my attention back to my letter, one of three I received. The second is from my family, the third is from the Department of the Army. The third contains my promotion from Private First Class to Specialist which means little more than I draw more back pay in my account than I usually do as a PFC.  
  
Andi's letter is telling of how she was down by the harbor, waiting for her parent's cruise ship to arrive with her brother Gavin and how they saw a hospital ship bringing hundreds of wounded from both Dyson City ashore. Many were on gurneys or wheelchairs; the lesser wounded were on crutches or walked to the convoy of ambulances and trucks that were their transportation to the convalescent hospitals in her area. I can only imagine the sight she witnessed, but it doesn't compare to the sight of what I witnessed in the aid stations, when men like them were being treated, seeing doctors and medics in bloodstained fatigues running about, trying to cope with the flow of casualties.  
  
I notice that one of our replacements left his forage cap by the fuel drum I was sitting on. I go to where the squad bunker is and find him. "Morerro, you left this." I say.  
  
He turns and faces me, a slight, Spanish looking youth of eighteen at the oldest. "You're a lifesaver man."  
  
"You're welcome." I reply.  
  
A few days pass; the first days always are edgy days for newbies. With doubled guard duties, due to recent nuisance attacks, there are now two of us at every guard post. Morerro is manning the infrared spotter scope where I man the machinegun poking out of the firing slit of our bunker.  
  
In those few days, the kid has gotten himself a reputation as a coward. Sergeant McCron is always on his case. One fire fight the kid cowered against a wall, not firing his weapon and getting a kick in the behind, literally, from Sergeant McCron afterward.  
  
"Where are you from?" I ask my fellow sentry at the machine gun.  
  
"Manhattan, New York." Morerro says.  
  
"Look, I see you've been having some problems around here. I know what you're going through." I say.  
  
"That damn Sergeant McCron won't leave me alone; he's always getting on my case." Morerro says, "He then starts giving me this shit about being a part of a team, doing my job for the squad."  
  
"Morerro, the only reason he gets on your case is because you aren't doing your job. Just kind of shut off your personality and go forward, take what he's saying, get the useful stuff out of it and filter out the expletives." I reply.  
  
"I don't like shutting off my personality." Morerro says.  
  
"I didn't say to do it all the time." I reply, patiently, "You're supposed to only do that when we're in combat. Then you can switch it back on again."  
  
The rest of the night passes in silence, and the next morning at breakfast, Pilgrim takes a seat beside me and Wiersbowski. "That Morerro kid's a wimp, don't you think?"  
  
"What makes you say that Pilgrim? He's not the first kid to get scared in battle." I reply.  
  
"The kid's a fucking whiny little spineless crybaby." Wiersbowski says.  
  
"That's harsh." I reply.  
  
"You should see him on patrol; I don't want him anywhere near me. Because he doesn't have a problem with dying for me, he's just afraid to." Wiersbowski says, contemptuous of the same words Morerro has once told me.  
  
"He's not that bad." I reply. Apparently Andi's diplomatic side has rubbed off on me, somewhat.  
  
"His brother's a war hero in the 82nd Airborne. I know if I were Lieutenant Morerro I'd feel ashamed to have a coward for a brother." Wiersbowski continues.  
  
"Wiersbowski, this kid didn't want to be here, he was probably drafted. He didn't enlist like we did." I reply, spooning down another gulp of chicken noodle soup. Wiersbowski can be a tad abrasive about people he thinks are cowards, but it's easy to be that way if you carry a big gun that blows most anything to hell in a hail of 20mm explosive tip rounds.  
  
I hear footsteps walking away behind me. Morerro must've heard every word we said. I do not know whether to be angry or sympathetic because I find his statement, "I don't want to die for someone else because my home isn't threatened."  
  
For the first time I realized how difficult it was for Andi, being the diplomatic one out of her family. It must've been hard when she agreed somewhat with both of the arguing parties. I am so lost in thought that I do not see Kat until he bumps into me, "Hey, I've scrounged some very good cakes for a bargain price from two old Bedouin crones, want to share some."  
  
"Sure." I reply. Kat hands me one and I have the perfect solution.  
  
"Don't tell me you've befriended that Morerro kid." Kat says.  
  
"Yes, I have, somewhat." I reply.  
  
"Piece of advice, he's a coward, leave him to rot." Kat says.  
  
For one of the few times in the army I disregard Kat's advice and go off to find Morerro. I split the cinnamon flavored cake with him and let him sputter out what has been getting to him.  
  
To me, parts of his character seem somewhat repugnant, the fact that he doesn't want to fight because he doesn't believe a crisis in North Africa or Europe doesn't affect him or that he doesn't want to just stick it out and do his job. But I can't just turn coldly away from him the way my friends have, it's not part of who I am. I can't believe Pilgrim, Fressan, and Wiersbowski could be so callous as to brand the kid a coward.  
  
As we talk, he sees Andi's picture in my helmet and looks at it saying, "She's beautiful."  
  
"See, Morerro, that's what keeps me buoyed," I say, "I look at this photo or think of her in my mind as we march forward and it takes me back to a peaceful time, that's what you need to do, find whatever gets you to a peaceful time and you'll make it through."  
  
"Why are you being nice to me? All the others like that asshole Wiersbowski or that weirdo Pilgrim hate me." Morerro says.  
  
"Let's just say that's not in my nature to be that way to someone because they're scared. And I'll talk to Pilgrim and Wiersbowski about their treatment of you." I say and leave the kid. He is a pitiable figure, a slight little boy in a uniform that is at least a size too large who looks like I must've looked when I first became one of "the Africans" of the barracks. Still, I keep my word out of sympathy and Pilgrim and Wiersbowski at least agree in words that they'll try to be more considerate in the future.  
  
The enemy is relying on stay behind groups in mini fortresses, and this is why many small towns in our route to Gazala fall quickly to our advance. Our new medic, Pierce says they must be stalling to build a fierce defense at Tobruk.  
  
Another patrol has been sent across the no man's land to determine enemy strength as we prepare to take Gazala. We travel in a looser grouping with Wiersbowski on point, McCron and Bronsky behind him, Fressan, Pierce, myself and Morerro in the middle and Kat and Pilgrim at the very end.  
  
We encounter an enemy patrol two dunes over that must have an energy orb projector because we see two fist sized orbs hurtle towards us. We all duck for cover and Kat sets up his machinegun and starts to return fire. Morerro is separated from us in the crossfire.  
  
"Morerro get over here!" someone shouts.  
  
The kid runs, ducking low as bullets zip over his head and an orb explodes near him. He ducks, cowering and weeping on the ground. Somehow he makes it to our position. The kid is panic stricken, he wants to run back to our lines, if that is possible.  
  
"Damn it! Stay down!" Sergeant McCron yells, in between firing his laser carbine and shouting over the radio for some fire support.  
  
"Stay down!" Pilgrim says, grabbing Morerro by the shoulder blades. The boy wriggles free and runs. Pilgrim chases him.  
  
"Pilgrim, God damn it! Stay where you are!" Wiersbowski shouts.  
  
Pilgrim doesn't hear us for he pushes the kid down as he sees something we do not, a Gollum sniper has been stalking our squad. Pilgrim sees the creature at almost the same instant the Gollum shoots Pilgrim in the head. Pilgrim squeezes the trigger as well and his bullet pierces the Gollum's head. Walter J. Pierce knows his trade because he scrambles from the foxhole as Morerro shouts, "Medic! Medic!"  
  
He returns, dragging Pilgrim behind him as well as Morerro. A humvee with a fifty-caliber machinegun mounted atop it pulls up. We get into the vehicle, piling inside, Pilgrim is lain across our laps.  
  
Pilgrim's face is swollen and pinched at the same time to an extent that it no longer resembles my good friend from ACME. I jump on the fifty caliber and start squeezing off bursts as Kat and Wiersbowski add their fire as the humvee speeds across the dunes.  
  
When we reach our lines, we confirm what we already know, Pilgrim is dead. I remove his dog tag and place it beside Rhett Garland's in my pocket. Two of my friends dead in six months, words cannot express how I feel. I feel anger towards the cowardly youth who got Pilgrim killed, as do the rest of us.  
  
Morerro looks stricken as later in the bunker I go through Pilgrim's belongings. The rest of us split his uniforms between us. Fressan gets two out of four of his fatigue blouses and I get the remaining two as well as two pairs of fatigue trousers. Fressan also scores an extra forage cap and set of web gear as well as a good knife out of Pilgrim's gear. We will send to his family his more personal effects. What really boils my blood is how a friend I went through everything from ACME selection and training through boot camp and six months in Africa with was killed by the cowardice of another. Fressan is just as, if not more so, angered, he has known Pilgrim for most of his life since they grew up in Stuttgart, Germany, together.  
  
When I see a picture of Wiersbowski, Fressan, myself and the now deceased Pilgrim before we shipped off to boot camp my blood really boils. Why did I befriend the little coward at all, I should have just left him to rot instead, then maybe Pilgrim wouldn't have run out to save him like he did because I had talked to him about being considerate toward Morerro.  
  
I mull this as I lie awake in the bunker. Our attack on Gazala is in two days and we are to be rested before our assault, says our division commander. Fressan awakens me from a light doze, "Hey, Gallatin, we're gonna teach the cowardly little bastard a lesson for getting Pilgrim killed. Are you in?"  
  
I feel mixed emotions at first as I get off my cot. "Give me a blanket, if you want no part in this, go back to sleep." Fressan says.  
  
"I do want a part in this." I reply. Wiersbowski and Fressan take one of my two blankets and we wait for Morerro to walk in, hiding at the entranceway of the bunker. As he does Fressan throws the blanket over his head and Wiersbowski pins him with his solid arms. Fressan starts pummeling Morerro and under the blankets I can hear pleas and a muffled, "Stop! What are you doing?"  
  
Then Fressan holds on and Wiersbowski has a go at it. Afterward, Wiersbowski and Fressan trade off, hitting and holding alternately. Then Fressan motions me over, "Do it."  
  
I suddenly regret my words and do not want to carry out the action. "C'mon, do it."  
  
Then I remember that I've known Pilgrim for nearly five years and this little coward for less than a week and I join in with blows of my own. "Remember this was just a bad dream crybaby." Fressan hisses in his ear.  
  
As I lie in my cot, I hear Morerro's muffled sobbing and a betrayed, "Why?" under his breath.  
  
What have I done? Just because I was angry at the death of a friend I took part in an attack on a kid who couldn't protect himself. What would my family think if they saw me do this, the same lad who stood up to an older youth bullying his brother, the same man who had stood up against a female gang member that was bothering Andi. What would they say if they learned I was as bad a bully as they were? I cup my hands over my ears as I attempt to sleep. I cannot sleep. Who am I to judge a coward much less beat someone I suspect as a coward?  
  
The next day doesn't bring any more solace, even mail call doesn't. I get a letter, two actually, one from Zack and the other from Ivy. Both of them are saying my old job back at the Agency is waiting for me and also for Fressan, Wiersbowski, and Pilgrim. Their field assignments await them at their old offices. They do not know Pilgrim won't ever return to the Stuttgart Field Office ever again, at least not yet. They say to hang in there and that I'm a good person. Hah! A man who beats another who can't defend himself is not a good person at all. I let my anger and just a few persuasive words from Fressan and Wiersbowski to beat up an innocent victim.  
  
And as if the offer of my old job means anything in this situation I've found myself in. I overheard Sergeant McCron and Lieutenant Parma talking about how we're expecting at least sixty percent casualties fighting for the area around Tobruk and Gazala. I remember this as I look up and down our line, looking at the man in front and the man in back of me. From these statistics one out of every three of us will be dead by the time we have pacified Tobruk.  
  
The mini fortresses around Tobruk were only a delaying tactic, designed to keep us busy while the city was fortified. The column comes under fire from several batteries inside Tobruk.  
  
Bronsky's swiftly on the radio and two Predator gunships come up and fire rockets into the city. We suddenly are jumped again, by a mixed group of zombies and crimson heads. There must be at least one Gollum or ogre with them for several fist sized energy orbs explode around us.  
  
I work to help Kat get his machinegun up to return fire from behind a burned out wall. Another blast disintegrates part of the wall. And over it I head screams,  
  
"Mama! Mama! AAAGGGHH!" Morerro is screaming, he's been hit or is being attacked.  
  
I see a crimson head standing over him with bloodied claws as it rips at his midsection lacerating viscera. I shoulder my rifle, take aim and fire several shots. Immediately I find Pierce who looks at Morerro, seeing his insides lying about the ground, it doesn't look good, the kid is almost certain to die. With a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach I grab Pierce's arm and take him over to Morrero.  
  
"God! God! Fuck you! I'm dying! I'm dying Gallatin!" Morerro shouts as I reach him. I try to drag him back to where Kat is currently firing his machinegun with Wiersbowski's fire accompanying. He shrieks again, inhuman agony a thousand times more frightening than anything I've heard from these creatures we fight. I grab several morphine syringes off of Pierce who grabs my arm and says, "You'll kill him with too much!"  
  
"He's already dead!" I shout back, giving Morerro two of them.  
  
"More. Give me more." Morerro says.  
  
Pierce gives me four more and I place them on the ground next to Morerro.  
  
The only thing I can think to say is, "Bye kid."  
  
"Bye Gallatin." Morerro says between sobs as he takes a syringe and injects. I drop to one knee, I am behind decent cover, and fire my rifle, killing three zombies coming towards a fresh corpse. Several creatures are already lying dead around me. Pierce is already somewhere else and the flying energy orbs show I'm not going anywhere anytime soon. I reload a new clip with one hand, firing my pistol with the other, killing an ogre and two zombies that approached the dying kid.  
  
He is still barely conscious as he looks up at me, watching me fighting off creatures that are coming for his dying flesh. I see in his eyes he is making his peace with me. "Mama." Morerro whispers, and starts to weep, "Mama. I wanna go home. I wanna go home. Mama. Mama."  
  
It's more than I can stand. A boy who didn't want to be here, one who was labeled a coward and a misfit by his fellow soldiers, even one whom he thought he could turn to is now dying. By the time the creatures are beaten back, Morerro is dead. I remove one of his dog tags and stick it in my pocket.  
  
I look at the pinkish glow of Tobruk, burning brightly from our bombardments from both air and artillery. I look at the recently deceased Private Morerro, eighteen years old and afraid, a boy labeled a coward by other soldiers not much older than he. My emotions are a jumble as the answer to this question is way beyond my comprehension. Is this boy the measure of a coward? I do not know, but though I tried to reach out to him, I let my anger towards his perceived fault in Pilgrim's death cloud it. It is only through a war that I met this youth, and it is also through a war that I had to say goodbye almost a week after I met him.  
  
The day after the battle I am awarded the Silver Star by my company commander. But such an award, though it is greatly esteemed, means little to me for the experience I had gone through to receive it. A hollow victory earned only through the fact that a young boy is dead and I am alive. I feel like a low life, yes, but I am alive and that's all that matters. 


	5. Crossing the Barrier

Crossing the Barrier  
  
Disclaimer: Read and heed previous chapters.  
  
I am called before my company commander and learn that I have a full twenty-five days of leave plus a week long refresher course at the end of my leave break. All together that makes thirty two days, practically a full month's leave. The refresher course will consist of soldierly routines which any graduate of Basic is already greatly familiar with and is for men returning from leave breaks to the front lines.  
  
Tobruk has fallen before us, though we have suffered great losses. It is December 5, 2141. Bardia has been retaken and the Egyptian frontier is just ahead of us as well as our first target in the region, Sidi El Barrani. The Egyptian soldiers in the neighboring encampment are rapturous with joy with one overzealous man firing burst of energy from an electric gun into the night sky.  
  
This provokes a massive firing up and down the lines from jittery sentries on the frontier of our territory. I sit on my cot, sewing a set of corporal's chevrons into my sleeves. These chevrons I earned because of Bronsky, killed when he stepped on a landmine in the no man's land, returning from a patrol. Fressan gets two of my shirts as I inherit two of Bronsky's shirts.  
  
"That's great." Kat says, when I break the news to him, "That means you'll see your Andi again?"  
  
I nod, for the first time in almost a year I dare to dream of coming home. I remember when I left home, me and three other boys from Nutwood. Almost the whole town turned out to see us off, we were kissed by pretty girls and weeping mothers and decked in flower garlands, it was almost as if we had already won.  
  
I head out on a five ton truck the next morning with Wiersbowski, Fressan and Kat to see me off. Our company is being rotated to the rear for reinforcement and recuperation for a few weeks; I am being taken off to Gazala, where one of our nearest airstrips is located. I have two days of guard duty before I fly out on the next flight to Salerno and afterward I will hop onto a civilian flight to London the next morning.  
  
Standing at the guard post located near the control tower I can hear the DC-4 Dakota transports, large twin prop driven aircraft, landing supplies and reinforcements. My relief comes up and takes his post as I gather my kit together and wait for the aircraft to be refueled and checked by the mechanics, a two hour wait. Sitting atop my field pack, my helmet on my web gear and my rifle across my knees, I pull a picture from my helmet. It is a creased and somewhat folded picture, having been subject to the stresses of everyday life for a soldier. I gaze longingly and lovingly at Andi's smiling face, frozen in time.  
  
The boarding call sounds and since I am able bodied I help the loadmasters help the wounded aboard first. These are men destined for hospitals in Sicily and southern Italy to recover from severe wounds. Finally we come aboard. I sit, cramped between a wounded sergeant with a broken arm and bandaged head from the 15th Light Infantry and a gunner from the 17th Field Artillery Regiment.  
  
The flight and the day I spend in Salerno are uneventful and I change from tan desert fatigues to my green service uniform, with a braid on the sleeve that has the seal of the United Systems Military and a palm tree, meaning I have served in Army Corps Africa and a telling sign in any military barracks of one of "the Africans" to the conscious observer.  
  
As the aircraft cruises over Europe with a mixed passenger complement of civilians and a few soldiers I am lost in thought. When the pilot says we are landing in London I am an automaton when I board the maglev train to Nutwood. I slowly begin to awaken when I see signs that bear familiar names, the train stops at the Sussex station. Sussex, Dorset, Percival, towns that mark the boundaries of my childhood. The train stops at the station and grabbing my field pack I walk out and I see a sight for sore eyes. It is Andi, save for the shorter haircut which extends down to the middle of her neck instead of at her shoulders where it used to, she is just the same as she was in the creased old photograph I often gazed at whilst in Africa.  
  
"You cut your hair." I say.  
  
"You let yours grow." Andi replies, indicating my longish crew cut that was much shorter when I left for Africa.  
  
I take her in my arms for the first time in months, feeling her slender, lithe frame against me. I am surprised to see her, I had planned to spend my first half of my leave with my family and the second half with Andi but now that she is here I won't have to do as much traveling.  
  
As I reach the familiar streets of Nutwood Forest many aspects of my being, lying long dormant because of the strain of the battlefield begin to reassert themselves. I smile more easily now as I walk arm in arm with Andi. My parents are at home, as are my little brothers, Michael and David.  
  
I go to my bedroom to change into my civilian clothes. They feel soft, wonderful, and light. My old leather jacket is a little bit tight across the shoulders; I have grown in the army. I walk back into the living room. My father asks me how things are going at the front.  
  
"Things are going as usual." I reply, I cannot convey with words the terror of a barrage, the bone chilling shouts of ogres charging our position, the scents of death and rot as zombies lurch about nor the feel of being starred at by a telescopic sight of a Gollum.  
  
Andi and I go for a walk. It is a long and lengthy one through the town. I see Mr. Cavendish and ex ACME detective and the local surveyor, an older fellow with a gray mustache and graying hair as well as a round shape, enjoying a smoke of his pipe outside of the Rose and Crown pub.  
  
"Martin, how have you been old boy?" Cavendish asks.  
  
"I've been better Mr. Cavendish." I reply.  
  
"How've you been Andi?" Cavendish asks.  
  
"I'm pleased to see you again." Andi replies.  
  
"How are things at the front?" Cavendish asks, "Mr. Bevel's boy being drafted wasn't the only draft. Constable Gosling was also called up two months ago. Both he and Mr. Bevel's boy have been sent off to Dyson City."  
  
I shudder inwardly; Dyson City is where the Biohazard first struck Earth and is where some of the most savage fighting of this war is taking place. North Africa would seem a picnic to the soldiers in Dyson. This I know because I saw a plane full of wounded from the battle as well as a very large stack of body bags at the airfield. The aircraft had come from Dyson City.  
  
I go inside the pub with Andi and order our dinner. As we wait for our meal, I see the town shelter being built. It is supposedly a place where civilians can hide and the local militia or army units can make a stand to defend them if a Biohazard were to break out. I have come upon similar shelters on the front. At Derna I nearly vomited when we opened a shelter hoping to find survivors but only discovering that the creatures had been there before us and their shelter had turned into a tomb with zombies shambling about inside it.  
  
Strange, I am now far away from the front or any fighting, yet I can see things in terms of how I saw them on the frontlines. The army has changed me and Andi can see it as she takes one of my trembling hands. The look in her gray eyed gaze says volumes to me, more than words can say. She is saying, "Martin, what has happened to you?"  
  
I cannot bear to keep it within any longer. I tell her everything, about Rhett Garland's death, the terror of being trapped in the no man's land, the visceral fear of falling energy orbs, of Morerro's senseless death, and of Pilgrim being killed. She regards me with both deeper concern and love as she takes me in her arms. Just to hold on to Andi, to feel her slender frame through the material of her clothes, is what I spent countless desert nights dreaming of.  
  
We spend much of the night walking and speaking in the town. Andi tells me how grateful she is for what I'm doing. I don't feel it is much to be grateful for, it is only by sheer chance I am alive after months of bitter fighting in the dunes.  
  
"Martin, you've been through things no one deserves to go through." Andi replied, "I find that I love you even more for the fact that you're out there."  
  
This is still more damning to me, I am unworthy of such love and praise, for I took part in a group beating of a coward. We are sitting on a grassy knoll just outside Nutwood, looking up at the stars.  
  
"They're beautiful, aren't they?" Andi asks me.  
  
I look up at the stars and say the first thing that comes to mind, something I often would think on quieter periods on the front, "When I was in Africa I would look up on nights like this, although there are usually shells flying about or flares going off I could still see stars on a clear desert night. I would stare out at the heavens. It would bring about a sense of wonder, despite the terror about me, wonder about God allowing such beauty to exist and that I was only able to appreciate it because there was so much ugliness and destruction all around me."  
  
"When you were in Africa I looked at the stars every night and wondered if you were looking at those same stars every night." Andi replies, "I also made a wish every night for your safety."  
  
I see tears in her eyes; Andi must have felt terrible worry reading casualty reports every morning, seeing the hundreds of wounded being shipped from the Dyson City to hospitals in Boston. I wipe them gently from her cheek and guide her closer. The embrace we share is almost pure bliss, lifting my soul from the depths that the horrors of the front have dragged it.  
  
I am almost breathless when I pull away from her a bit, her left arm is still draped over my shoulder and my right arm is around her waist. She turns and looks at me, longingly, as if at any moment I might disappear back into the barren, gritty, and dusty hell that is the North African front.  
  
She tenderly runs a hand down a scar behind my left ear as she faces me. That was from the terrible shelling we witnessed at Agedabla and was a minor wound from a shell fragment. The war has left physical and mental scars upon me. The sound of a diesel engine, of several diesel engines, startles us and we turn and see several five ton trucks and half tracks driving down the motorway, their distinctive silhouettes in the moonlight. Even at home the signs of the war are everywhere. I see the half tracks towing several quad barreled 20 mm anti-aircraft guns. It's the 117th Flak Division, setting out to reinforce us in Africa.  
  
"Are they going to Africa?" Andi asks.  
  
I nod silently; even in the night I can see that many of these troops are young boys like Morerro. I remember air attacks by large, mutated wasps. At first they were laughable, carrying single energy orbs and dropping them on our positions, a nuisance really but no severe threat. Then they started to adapt, attacking in swarms, picking off solitary men at their posts by snatching them into the dunes and injecting them with their toxic venom, dropping energy orbs on larger troop concentrations, and latching onto our aircraft and tearing them apart. Fighters are only somewhat effective in stopping them and our 90mm dual purpose anti-aircraft/anti-tank guns are too slow firing. These four barreled flak guns in large concentrations we call "flak circuses" could actually be quiet effective.  
  
I see a baby faced gunner at his post behind the barrels at the gun mount, the other members of his crew stand ready with ammunition. The sight disturbs me, for it reminds me of things I'd best not think of.  
  
Andi feels the same way and I lead her to a spot near Wallingford Creek, which runs right by Nutwood Forest. It is a place where picnickers dine and lovers caress. I of course opt for the latter. Andi realizes this as well and in the pale moonlight, nicely aided by starlight I can make out her pretty, olive face, the curve of her breast, her silhouette by the light of the moon. We share an intimate moment that lifts my soul to greater heights. This is not merely erotic, although there is plenty of that feeling; it seems to be also a deeper sort of love. As we lay, breathless beside each other staring into the vastness of the heavens I pull her closer, and just close my eyes, savoring the moment. Latent passion, long dormant on the frontlines, love that always existed but only dared raise it's head at a quiet moment, all are now unfettered as I open my eyes and smile at my beloved. We put our clothing back in place, trying not to look to disheveled, and walk back to my house.  
  
Andi spends another week with us before she returns home to spend Christmas with her family. I bid her goodbye at the airport, feeling the small tendrils of a sense of dread creeping up on me, for it will soon be my turn to fly to Salerno and eventually Africa.  
  
I cannot watch the news; it is too full of reports from the front. Those damned correspondents. What do they know about war? The night I took Andi to the airport I learned my lesson about the news, do not watch it while on leave. I see an aerial view of the devastation over Dyson City, the flash of exploding artillery, the scurrying of troop movements, the rising plumes of smoke. So for the duration of my leave I avoid watching news broadcasts.  
  
My brothers continually ask me about the front; it is inevitable due to the inherent curiosity of youth. I only wish they knew enough to maintain their innocence. I give vague details, sparing them the graphic sights I have seen, such as the desiccated corpses I found in the shelter at Derna, or the pure terror of an air attack, or night patrols to gather information on the enemy. Innocence like theirs is fragile, delicate, like the wings of a butterfly, the slightest touch and it will shatter like glass. If I tell them the whole story of what I have seen they will age before their time. I am nineteen but the experience of the front leaves me feeling many times my age. My family cannot fully comprehend what has happened to me, my transformation into an old man trapped in a young man's body.  
  
The days blur together and save for the occasional dream of the frontlines they are altogether pleasant. But as these days, these peaceful days, these islands of paradise in the turbulent seas of hell, pass I feel ever more uneasy. For that inevitable day dawns and I am to return to the front.  
  
I watch, wistfully, sadly as London's airport grows ever smaller in the distance, returning to Salerno and eventually North Africa. I feel nothing but a mixture of numbness and that wistful longing that I felt inside me during months on the African front. It is a wistful longing for hearth, home, and love that is far removed from the dusty squalor of the desert. 


	6. Tragedy

Tragedy  
  
Disclaimer/Author's Note: This was inspired by Everywhere, by Carmine to a large extent and is indirectly a tribute to those who died on September 11th, 2001. I do not own Where on Earth is Carmen Sandiego, nor do I own Kenneth Branagh's adaptation of William Shakespeare's Henry V.  
  
~ ~ ~ ~  
  
January 2142, the New Year dawns as I step out onto the airfield. The supply depot provides me with rations and water as well as ammunition. I poke around the depot, looking for the nearest truck. The driver agrees to take me to the 15th Light Infantry's positions and tells me I'll have to find my unit for myself.  
  
I garner a little sleep in this drive across the sandy dunes. When I finally reach my company area, Kat, Wiersbowski and Fressan are on hand to welcome me. They fill me in on the news of the next few months of fighting. We have become one of the flying divisions; wherever we are most needed we go into battle, reinforcing sectors of our line where the fighting is most intense. The enemy is making a desperate stance to keep us from reaching Mersa Matruh with constant artillery barrages followed by mass infantry charges.  
  
The front has become static again, partially due to flooding from the rainy season and a shortage of supplies. We are again reinforced by another complement of new recruits. The fighting is as savage and intense as it has been before. My first night returning to my company I am awakened by a flak battery. I know to take cover because an air attack has come. Tracers from the quad barreled flak guns Andi and I saw on my leave home streak across the skies. I see a wasp fall from the skies, falling gracelessly to the desert floor, struck by 20mm cannon shells.  
  
Once again my animal instincts return, those same primal instincts that kept our ancestors alive in savage times. Kat asks me, "How did it go?"  
  
"All but the last day felt like pure bliss." I reply.  
  
Fressan and Wiersbowski clean their weapons on their cots. I attempt to sleep yet again only to be awakened by bursts of shell fire as an artillery duel is being fought. Huddled in a trench I look up, it is an awesome, terrifying sight to see shells exploding, flares flying, and explosions sounding. It would be the ultimate light show if it wasn't so dangerous.  
  
My helmet falls from my head and Andi's smiling face, illuminated by a purple Verey light exploding over my head, stares directly at me for a few seconds. Almost as soon as it begins, the barrage ends.  
  
I am assigned guard duty soon after the barrage and as I walk the moonless night, rifle ready, my pistol with a round chambered and the safety on, I regard the eerie new silent stillness all around me. Only the occasional rifle shot, or staccato machinegun burst breaks the silence of my watch. We are still close enough to the front lines to hear the sounds of war as I nibble on a crust of bread from a stale ration loaf.  
  
Barely a few hours after a moment of sleep I steal after my relief shows up I feel Sergeant McCron waking me up. The company is being sent to reinforce a sector being attacked by intensive artillery and infantry assaults. Troops from the 115th Libyan Infantry Division are barely holding on.  
  
Almost at the instant that the next barrage begins I dive into the nearest trench. The Libyan soldier beside me takes a direct hit from an energy orb that explodes at his feet, sending blood and body parts in an arc of wet destruction. I am struck full in the face by a stream of the red liquid.  
  
The barrage ceases, we are tense in our holes, I hear Kat cocking the machinegun to my left. We hear moans and shouts breaking the temporary silence of the post barrage. A swarm of zombies and ogres swarm towards the position. "Fire!" Sergeant McCron's New York accent booms.  
  
We all open fire on our attackers, Kat's machinegun is ripping swaths into their ranks as are Wiersbowski's rounds. I pull a grenade from my web gear, pull the pin, time it and throw it into a group of zombies. The grenade explodes as it arcs into the face of one of them. It is a good throw that sprays shrapnel into the heads and torsos of three zombies. Fressan adds more rifle fire as I reload my own rifle, shooting my pistol one handed as I do so.  
  
The sun climbs over the horizon and the shooting wanes and begins to cease. As the assault breaks, we calm down. I shakily pull the crust of bread I was nibbling on a few hours ago. Rations have been lowered because of supply problems, our offensive is being slowed by its own momentum, our supply lines are badly stretched, and many times our troops are fighting with hardly anything in our stomachs. Try as I might to stretch my supplies out, my stomach complains incessantly, for the month I spent at home and at the refresher course have accustomed it to being well fed on cue. It is almost near starvation on the frontlines and the seconds drag on inexorably. I tear a small piece off of my last fist sized ration loaf. It is hard, black bread, almost like overcooked pumpernickel with a small tin of olive oil issued with it. The olive oil may soften the ration loaf, but I don't care much for its taste. But still it is sustenance. There are two cans of chicken broth in my pack for daily rations but even on the frontlines before I went home I was used to four. I am also used to around five ration loaves per day instead of two.  
  
Hours on the front turn into days in short order, and the rumor that we are reinforcing the Libyan flank for our assault on Mersa Matruh is spreading through the ranks. Later Sergeant McCron confirms these rumors. We do not know when we will attack just yet. But we know when we see three green flares at night or hear a whistle during the day that is our signal to go over the top following the tanks of the Egyptian 3rd Armored Division that the Libyans, reinforced by us, are supporting.  
  
The Libyans sector of the front had been taking the most fierce of the offensives, the poor bastards have been fighting for better than a month to keep the creatures from widening a gap between the Sicilians to the south of us and the Egyptians to the north. They are haggard, with scraggly growths of beard and eyes that stare off into the distance. That is the look of almost all of our men on the frontlines. Again I am becoming an automaton, my instinct keen once more. Intellectually I am no better than a savage bushman, living an artificial aboriginal life brought about by crashing shells and many forms of death.  
  
I hear the tank motors firing up. My heart skips a beat. Several times the Egyptians fire up their tank motors to confuse the enemy into thinking our killing blow at Mersa Matruh is imminent, but they do not attack. Then I hear Predator gunships flying off in the distance, shooting rockets into the enemy positions, and then the artillery fires off a barrage of shells. The Egyptians' tank motors act like a chorus in a great orchestra of death and destruction. The whistles sound and the Egyptian tanks begin to advance with their mechanized grenadiers and infantry following behind. We climb from the trenches and follow their movements on half tracks or on foot. Once we reach the outskirts of Mersa Matruh, the Egyptians begin to fire their tank shells into the city as we dismount the vehicles and follow them, making sure enemy anti-tank squads do not get near their prey.  
  
Once more into the breach we go. Almost like an automaton my body moves, following instincts long since ingrained, but there is an undisputable agony within me. That agony is not the physical agony of a wound, nor the emotional agony of seeing a friend die. It is a longing agony, the sort of agony that can only come from the soul of a man condemned to the abyss who has had a taste of paradise.  
  
Each explosion, each gunshot, each scream and battle cry brings to me the horrifying realization as to where I am. Man does not belong in this vision of Dante's inner circle of Hell; human beings were destined to live peaceful and fulfilling lives. I am but nineteen and know nothing but devastation, death, loss and bravery. A light, but a small fissure in a dark cave peeks through my wretched, hungry state and tells me otherwise. I see Andi's face, brightly angelic; the faces of my brothers, my family also begin to appear, wanting to lift me from this abyss but unable to do so.  
  
"C'mon, keep moving! Keep moving!" Sergeant McCron shouts, prodding me from behind, pushing me forward. An ogre comes towards me, intent on ending my life, two rounds from my rifle into its chest and another two to it's head see that this is not so.  
  
The savage battle wages all day, I notice as dusk begins to creep over the desert yet the gunfire does not cease. I pull my pistol from my web gear, reloading my rifle with the other hand as we take a massive assault by zombies into our flanks. I see Kat firing his machinegun, not in the usual short controlled bursts he normally fires, but firing almost nonstop, his machinegun sweeping in a 180 degree arc. The barrel starts to glow, white- hot and Fressan goes to help Kat change out his barrels. Wiersbowski adds his fire, a volley of 20mm rounds chewing a group of zombies into bits. I fire my pistol almost nonstop as several crimson heads begin to appear. As this savage counterattack is absorbed, I find myself firing both my weapons nonstop. I see the corpse of a dead Egyptian at my side. Going through his web gear I pull a bandolier of magazines from his corpse and add two more rifle magazines to my web gear. We have broken the assault and advance again into Mersa Matruh.  
  
All I know is brief and stolen snatches of sleep constantly interrupted by assaults and counterattacks by the creatures desperate to drive us from Mersa Matruh. Fluttery dreams of a warm hearth and idyllic village and of my beloved all enter my mind. I awake and stare through sunken and glassy eyes at Andi's picture folded inside my helmet. These dreams are a delicate gossamer web that keeps me from falling into despair as I hope simply to survive from day to day.  
  
Almost as soon as I place my helmet back on my head I hear a tremendous rumble. Overhead I see our fighters dueling with several wasps and our Predator gunships and artillery firing round after round toward an enemy charging towards our positions with all that he has. "Man your positions! Now!" Sergeant McCron shouts through our group.  
  
I duck into a foxhole that was part of a roadside ditch where Kat puts up his machinegun; Wiersbowski takes up another position with Fressan to my right. We see the first line of ogres, Gollums, and crimson heads that survived the shelling and the missiles from the Predator gunships charging forth, almost like the great army of orcs from the pages of Tolkein himself. Kat starts to fire, forgetting entirely about conserving ammunition as both he and Wiersbowski hose the enemy number down with bullets. The enemy line sprouts holes as their numbers begin to fall but like a horrific flood the enemy charges back over the corpses of their dead, as I throw another grenade into their ranks I cannot help but again be reminded of a simpler time.  
  
It was the time Andi and I were watching Henry V while I was still an ACME detective after a case I had took me close to Boston. We were at her house watching the video as I held her close to me. This was the scene at the battle of Agincourt. Like the besieged warriors of Henry V, we fight with savage desperation despite the onslaught.  
  
My rifle goes empty again and I barely pull my pistol and fire two rounds, killing a pair of ogres that had gotten into the roadside ditch we are defending before the enemy line crashes against our positions. The battle is becoming a hand to hand melee. With my pistol and several grenades I manage to kill several ogres and Gollums before they reach our positions. Wiersbowski fires his Wraith cannon like a fire hose into their ranks, sending blood, bone fragments and pieces of heads, limbs, and torsos flying about. My rifle is slung at my side as I reload my pistol yet again, shooting wildly into the enemy ranks, watching with horrified fascination as a Gollum I wounded is trampled by several of its fellows behind it as they single mindedly seek to swarm our positions.  
  
Several mortar rounds detonate into their midst and machine gunners in other positions as well as several tanks add their fire into the enemy flanks. I see seven ogres gang up upon a young lieutenant, fighting valiantly like a lion in this rising evil tide, his electric gun firing in bursts and his pistol picking up the pace when it runs dry. They close with him and stab him relentlessly again and again. He drops his pistol, hanging from a lanyard from his web gear. He weakly fires a burst of electricity, killing one of his attackers. Blood spurts from his wounds and as he opens his mouth, shouting a silent cry into the heavens, blood gushes between cracked teeth. He weakly shoots off two rounds into an ogre and the other six keep stabbing at him and then leave him for dead on his knees. Pilgrim donates them a grenade at their feet that blasts them into body fragments.  
  
They are getting so close that I am using my rifle as a club and shooting them at point blank range with my pistol. I throw my last grenade into a crowd of zombies mobbing Kat and Fressan at the machinegun where Kat is calmly and coolly changing out his barrel. I keep firing round after round from both my weapons, killing several creatures that come too close.  
  
This constant wave of assaults seems to go on forever. I see Predator gunships firing rockets and 30mm cannon shells into crowds of zombies, using their guided missiles to blow scorpions to pieces, and turning the no man's land into a deadly killing field. I measure time by the pile of empty casings from our fired weapons at the bottom of the ditch; they reach nearly half way up my knee now.  
  
Finally the assault breaks, we see the enemy retreating. It is just as well for their last assault used up the last of my ammunition. Had they mustered enough forces to attack again we would have been finished. Again Henry V comes to my mind, this time the scene at the end of the battle of Agincourt.  
  
"Non nobis domine, domine," the tune begins to escape from my parched lips, my thick tongue tasting a mixture of spittle, dust, blood, and gun smoke, "Non nobis domine. Sed nomini, sed nomini, tuo da gloriam."  
  
Fressan and Wiersbowski join in as well, "Non nobis domine, domine, Non nobis domine. Sed nomini, sed nomini, tuo da gloriam."  
  
We walk across the killing ground, the enemy is too far to pursue, but our gunships keep hounding their retreat. We poke enemy bodies with rifle barrels, any that move are quickly executed with a single round. I pick up the slain corpse of the dead lieutenant I had seen die valiantly earlier. I lift his body over my shoulder; he was our new platoon commander, as courageous a fellow as any officer I have seen. I watch as Kat and Wiersbowski throw several dead zombies into a pile and light them ablaze with a can of petrol from a nearby jeep.  
  
Hoarsely I keep singing the old Latin Psalm, relieved that I am still alive and whole, though dirty, ragged, tired and smeared with blood and dust. "Non nobis domine, domine."  
  
The song catches on with several of the more literate ones in our ranks and they sing along or improvise the tune. I can almost hear a full choir as in the end of Henry V. For once the front is silent, still, and we have driven them back all the way to El Alamein, the site of a major battle between the British and the Germans in 1942. Strange, almost 200 years later we are fighting on this same ground.  
  
We set up temporary billets yet again, we are resting, regrouping and being reinforced as best we can with replacements from Greece and Crete being integrated into the ranks. I sit upon my cot, cleaning my weapons, my desert fatigues faded to a whitish yellow hue stained with filth, dirt, and blood from the battle. We have now been at Mersa Matruh for almost two weeks while the reinforcements are being trained and integrated into our units.  
  
The satellite phone in the middle of our tent rings and I pick it up. "Ivy?" I ask.  
  
"Hey Martin, Andi tried to call you earlier but you weren't available, she wanted me to tell you that if you want to talk to her she'll be at my house tomorrow." Ivy replies, "We're just going to do some touristy things, hang out, that sort of thing. When and if she gets tired of playing tourist I'll see if she can't call you."  
  
"That'll be grand." I reply, a little glimmer of excitement, much less than such news usually would bring about, breaks through my hard shell of exhaustion and fatigue.  
  
"She hasn't left for the airport yet, you might be able to catch her for a quick hello." Ivy replies.  
  
"Okay, thanks." I reply with a lot of enthusiasm breaking through that hard shell of exhaustion.  
  
I hang up and punch in a number I know by heart. The phone rings, and rings again and continues to ring until the fifth time and the answering machine picks up. "Andi, it's me, Martin. If you're there, please pick up, I really want to hear your voice right now."  
  
She doesn't answer, but the traces of my inner destitution and desperation will be left like a fossil imprint in a rock formation, a little piece of the hell I am enduring. Apparently she is already at the airport.  
  
There is a small satellite television set in our billet that the Division Headquarters Company whom we are billeted with right now share with us. There usually is nothing but the occasional film, news broadcast, which I detested at home but will watch at the front, and the BBC. I switch to the BBC news network, which we usually do when we get the TV, keeping it on that channel as we go to bed.  
  
I see a Predator gunship firing off a vicious rocket salvo and see tanks and infantry advancing on foot from the gun camera of an SH-6 Little Bird observation skimmer. The broadcaster is describing a battle I had just fought a few short hours before. I see another shocking sight. It is a soldier, carrying a dead comrade across his shoulders, the crest of the 15th Light Infantry Division barely visible through the coat of dust and blood on his uniform. His lips are moving, a familiar tune on them. I know at the first instant that the soldier is me and the dead lieutenant I carry over my shoulders was the one who's last desperate moments I witnessed from my trench as I fought off an assault.  
  
It is the next morning where I sink into the depths of the abyss, crushed like an automaton beyond all thinking.  
  
"Holy hell! Wake up lads!" shouts Sergeant Burton, weapons platoon.  
  
This awakens me from a deep slumber. "What is it?" I ask, walking from my cot.  
  
It is then that I see the burning remains of a building very familiar to me. In almost a déjà vu of the September 11th 2001 terrorist attacks I read about in my history books as a child I see the building collapse in upon itself. "Oh my God! It can't be."  
  
"The Tower of London has been attacked." Burton replies. I see footage of an aircraft crashing into the Tower over the Thames River. In that background I hear the phone ringing.  
  
"Gallatin!" Kat shouts, shoving it into my hand.  
  
It is Ivy, "Martin! Holy God did you just hear."  
  
"Yes! I did!" I shout back, "That's my bloody back yard for God's sake!"  
  
"No, there have been about three other attacks, two in America!" Ivy shouts back to me.  
  
Almost numb and dull with shock I can barely think. Then I immediately begin to worry, Andi was supposed to be traveling today. That is when we both hear a voice on the three way circuit.  
  
"Hello?" I hear Ivy's voice, tinny on the conference line that her parents installed into the house.  
  
"Ivy?"  
  
"Andi? Are you alright?" Ivy asks.  
  
I feel relief, Andi, she's still alive. It quickly evaporates when I hear her words. There is terror in her voice between half choked sobs.  
  
"Ivy, please listen. My flight's been taken over by those creatures, those Gollum things Martin's been fighting in Africa. I borrowed someone's cell phone and want to tell you that some of the people on board are planning to attack the creatures." Andi says between sobs and hiccups.  
  
Later that day I hear news of a plane crash in the Colorado Rockies. I refuse to believe it, I am numb with shock. Maybe it wasn't Andi's plane, maybe the passengers succeeded in fighting those creatures off. Part of me knows this isn't true, I have seen armed soldiers try to fight Gollums and die. However part of me just refuses to believe it.  
  
The denial lasts up until mail call the next day. "Gallatin."  
  
I receive not one but two letters. I open the first, from home, it tells me my brother David was killed at the Tower of London yesterday when his class was visiting it on a field trip. This additional anguish tears through the cynical and weary façade that is inherent to a soldier on the frontlines. I open the second letter. It is from her brother Gavin.  
  
I read the contents, "Dear Martin, I don't know how to tell you this but Andi is dead. She was killed yesterday.I'm joining the Army today to get those things for what they did to my sister."  
  
I go numb inside, I am now a true automaton. Two people very close to me, innocent civilians, are dead. And like a severed string my last tenuous hold to the civilized world snaps. I want revenge, nothing more, nothing less. 


	7. Gotterdammerung

Gotterdammerung  
  
Disclaimer/Author's Note: The literal translation of the verse that Martin and his companions sang in the previous chapter is this: "Not To Us O Lord Not To Us But To Your Name Give Glory" Gotterdammerung means Twilight of the Gods.  
  
February 2142: Six days have passed since I received news of my loved ones' deaths. I have gone out on another patrol. I have been volunteering for this duty with increasing frequency since that day. Me and six companions agree upon a plan and slip out past the wire to spy on enemy positions at El Alamein. They look formidable indeed, but for the first time since this war I fear them not.  
  
We creep back to our lines and as we do so the fear that we will encounter a marauding band of ogres or Gollums, creatures a lot more intelligent than zombies and thus more keen and harder to deceive of our presence, is no longer in me. Let them come and I will take as many of them as possible to the grave with me.  
  
A patrolling band of Gollums is creeping back to their lines from a similar patrol against our own lines. Sergeant McCron halts the patrol and orders us to take ambush positions. He fires the first shot which takes a Gollum down with one shot. I start shooting with cold precision at first and then violent intensity with both weapons. Sergeant McCron orders a cease fire as I throw a grenade into the midst of three Gollums. We search them for weapons, documents, anything that battalion intelligence might find useful.  
  
As we do I see a single Gollum, a sucking wound in its throat, the first creature hit by our impromptu ambush. It is moving feebly, barely conscious but still alive. Six days before, had I encountered such a sight I would have been moved to pity at the destitution of war and how this creature was once a human being like myself. Now I only feel a cold and savage contempt, for these creatures were responsible for two deaths of people that I cared for and hundreds more who couldn't defend themselves. I raise my pistol and I see the look of alarm and dread in the creature's face as it gives me gasping pleas, its lamp like eyes fill with dread and it puts its shaking hands out in a vain request for mercy. I give none as I fire the last six rounds in the clip into its face. The first round killed the creature but I empty six rounds, watching as the creature's skull fragment apart like a split watermelon. I care little as gore splashes into my face. I see Wiersbowski standing over a living Gollum, cowering and wounded by my grenade fragments.  
  
Savagely I kick it in the ribs with a running start. It gasps feebly; one or two ribs are broken. "Sarge, do we take prisoners?" Wiersbowski asks.  
  
"Of course not, kill them all." Sergeant McCron replies.  
  
Wiersbowski forces the creature to its knees as I reload a magazine into my pistol. Placing it next to the creature's temple I squeeze the trigger and watch it buck wildly for a few moments as its nervous system reacts to being shot in the head. We shoot all the wounded survivors of our ambush. For the first time I feel no remorse for doing this sort of thing, I almost relish it because of what these creatures have taken from me. Like an avenging angel I slay these demons whenever and wherever I find them.  
  
We return to our lines with vital intelligence. I am so drained I nearly forget to salute a new lieutenant that has replaced the valiant platoon leader I saw die at Mersa Matruh. He is a medium built man with close- cropped graying hair from Boblingen, Germany. He was a sergeant with the 127th Infantry Division at Dyson City, wounded in the midst of the battle, sent to Officer's Candidate School and now shipped of to the North African theater in time for one of the largest battles of the campaign, El Alamein. Fortunately he is the patient type and does not choose to give me the scathing dressing down our old platoon leader used to give to soldiers who failed to salute him. That was his one and only major flaw that I noticed. 2nd Lieutenant Franz Wachter is different in that regard. I have not seen him in combat however, so I have no idea as to how good he is as a combat leader.  
  
That changes a few days later, towards the end of the month when he leads the platoon out on a patrol towards enemy lines. For days on end our gunships, artillery, and fighter bombers have been pummeling opposing positions without letup. The vast majority of Army Corps Africa's offensive power is being concentrated on this assault. It is unnerving to hear the loud whoosh of rockets from the gunships, with the artillery acting as a sort of non-stop refrain, lobbing shells at El Alamein with blazing intensity.  
  
Now we are sending platoon and company strength probing attacks after squad sized patrols ferret out major opposing positions. Our bombardment hasn't been merely one sided. We too have been the recipient of several attacks. Once on grave detail I find what appears to be a discarded uniform of a soldier from the 117th Flak Division that probably didn't know how to take cover during a bombardment. We find fragments of his naked body some feet away.  
  
"No question, energy orb shock wave blew this poor bastard out of his clothing." Fressan remarks in a manner that would make any civilian grow pale.  
  
Why should a civilian grow pale? The dead man wasn't in our unit; it was his misfortune, and not ours. The next thing I know is the corpse starts twitching and starts rising to its feet. I am closest to it and open fire.  
  
Suddenly more of the loathsome creatures come burrowing out of the sand. This is a new tactic they have learned. The ogres and Gollums bury crimson heads and zombies in the no man's land and await patrols to step over them or wait until the patrol is behind them. Now there are zombies in our midst and one of them is fighting Wiersbowski, grabbing a hold of his Wraith cannon. I put my pistol to its head and squeeze the trigger. We dare not use any grenades because of our close proximity and the fight denigrates into a hand to hand contest with fighting knives, bayonets, pistols and rifle butts.  
  
I see Kat bury his entrenching tool into the neck of a zombie that must have been quite a large man in life but his girth is hard to determine, the breadth of his shoulders shrunken by necrotic decay and death. I see two zombies drag an unfortunate soldier over a dune and I can hear screams as they begin to consume him alive. I throw a grenade over that dune and am struck full force by blood and fragments of skin and bone.  
  
I can see our platoon in full retreat, several badly injured and shooting wildly. We leave a number of our dead in the midst of the living dead roaming about the dunes. I see Kat and Wiersbowski laying down suppressive fire, Kat no longer firing in short and controlled bursts, but using the machinegun as a fire hose spraying lead as opposed to water. Belt after belt of ammunition beats back this inhuman tide of the undead, keeping them at a distance as we reach our own lines. Over the dunes, an SH-6 observation skimmer rises up and sprays the attacking horde with rockets and mini-gun fire.  
  
It is early in the morning as the dawn creeps over the horizon, the disc of the sun a fiery copper red over the horizon as the tank motors begin firing up, revving up many times to confuse the enemy as to the exact time of our assault. The Egyptians have been doing this for days while we launched several probing attacks on the enemy lines, determining numbers and positions. After another barrage of missiles, rockets, and shells the Egyptian tanks advance with our units on their heels to deter enemy tank fighting squads.  
  
What follows is a savage battle, the like of which I have not yet seen before. As soon as we cross the no man's land, we are hit by savage attacks with zombies and ogres attacking our infantry, allowing several Gollum tank fighting squads past. The tankers are no slouches themselves; very frequently they grind to the edge of foxholes and spray machinegun fire in, obliterating anything inside there. The Gollums throw energy grenades, fire orbs, and drop explosives into the hatches of the tanks. The tank beside me suddenly belches smoke and I see two blinded and coughing Egyptian tankers push their way out. Suddenly two ogres grab them and throw them into the midst of a mob of zombies which tears them apart.  
  
I see a tank fire a 75 mm tank round into a cluster of zombies coming down from the other side of the dune. The shell explodes, throwing several of them airborne. I see an energy orb from a portable orb projector carried by a single Gollum who is assisted by three of his fellows explode into the side of a Sicilian half-track.  
  
The survivors keep fighting the tank fighting units in savage firefights as they drag their injured comrades from the burning wreckage of their vehicle. Scores of energy orbs and crude explosives hammer our armored vehicles while the giant scorpions also spray their corrosive venom into our ranks and puncture the vehicle's hulls with their stingers and claws.  
  
We fight them with our Pak 3.7 cm anti-tank guns as well as our 90 mm dual purpose cannons as well as with Javelin anti-tank rocket launchers. I pick one up from the corpse of a dead replacement from Crete, shoulder the weapon and fire it into the brain casing area of a scorpion with two Gollums carrying an energy orb projector atop it. The explosion throws the two Gollums into our ranks and I see soldiers beat them to death with rifle butts. I see the Sicilians on our flank take a savage counter attack by a phalanx of ogres with a swarm of zombies coming after them. I watch as Wiersbowski blows apart a swarm of zombies with a burst of 20 mm cannon shells from his Wraith cannon. A nearby blast knocks me off my feet, displacing my helmet. Before I throw it back on I see Andi's picture.  
  
Barely a few days ago I would have said I was fighting to keep these things from harming her, but now I do not think such thoughts, I only think to destroy and kill in these intense moments of combat. I throw two grenades into a spider hole that may contain a few creatures. My hunch was correct because I see ogres madly scrambling out before the grenades explode, killing everything inside the hole.  
  
Savage firefights erupt all around me as I pull my pistol, shooting several zombies down as they close with our unit. A barrage of .50 caliber fire blasts the swarm apart as a tank opens up with it's machineguns only to explode as an energy orb crashes against it, throwing it's turret into the air and sending it crashing down atop our ranks.  
  
The retreat begins first as the Libyans begin to falter and then break as they absorb another savage counterattack going through their ranks. Then the Sicilians begin to falter as the Libyans begin a full out retreat on our flanks. The Egyptians provide cover as our own division begins its retreat.  
  
As the pursuit dies down, with the Egyptians providing their tanks as an armored spearhead through enemy lines, we march as battered, broken units, our numbers reduced across the desert sands. All through the night we march, harried by wasps all the way back to our lines at Mersa Matruh. The Libyans have taken too many casualties to fight as a cohesive unit. Thus the 115th Libyan Infantry Division fights on as an ad hoc battle group strung together by a few surviving officers and NCOs from that unit protecting our right flank as we continue our retreat, past the burning remains of several tanks and other vehicles destroyed in months of savage desert fighting.  
  
I am an automaton once again; my spirits are dampened by our current defeat and the deaths of my loved ones. I see battered and destroyed units attempting to regroup at Mersa Matruh. Fortunately General DeRutyer has planned for this disaster at El Alamein, he has had the engineers build lines of trenches, bunkers and pill boxes across the desert along our lines of retreat should we be forced from Mersa Matruh.  
  
Kat, Wiersbowski, Fressan and I take up positions in a pillbox just outside the approach to Mersa Matruh. The concrete pillbox overlooks a large sand dune and has enough room for the four of us and our machinegun. I sit and wait behind the machinegun, awaiting the inevitable counterattack that I know is imminent.  
  
This is the Mersa Matruh Line that we man, and must defend against an inevitable and major counteroffensive our implacable and ruthless foe is sure to launch. As I sit behind the machinegun, Kat, Wiersbowski and Fressan grab a few moments of sleep. I begin to doze off myself at my post. My sleep is light, barely enough to accommodate a fluttery dream of someone now dead.  
  
In my dream I feel Andi's gentle hand across my face as I crouch behind my machinegun. Her touch is gentle, soothing, taking me back to what used to be. Taking me back to when she was alive and well. It is a soothing sight to see her face, radiant and pristine, her smile warm and her arms open, an angel waiting to receive a soul of a sinner forever damned to the dark depths of Hell. I reach for her smiling as my hope rises, a soul exonerated from the Inferno, the Inner Circle of Hell.  
  
Then I hear an aircraft plummeting uncontrollably to the ground and Andi's final words, laced with terror. I feel myself plummeting deeper into Hell after having tasted a bit of Paradise. I am now dragged into the innermost circle of the damned.  
  
All I hear now is the crescendo of explosions and the ringing of my ears that follows after a savage firefight and repeated concussions that herald the approach of the Gotterdammerung, the aptly named Twilight of the Gods. 


	8. Wounded

Wounded  
  
Disclaimer: I do not own the Where on Earth is Carmen Sandiego franchise.  
  
~ ~ ~ ~  
  
March 2142: Again we are pushed back, marching across the dunes to another line of trenches and prepared positions with our backs to the border between Libya and Egypt. Again, we are filling holes in our ranks with replacements that die all too frequently within their first forty-eight hours on the line.  
  
We as veterans are not immune ourselves. Yesterday Fressan disappeared on sentry duty. He was walking his post along the fence line of a small ammunition depot behind the lines at midnight and was never heard from again.  
  
I join a patrol to search for him; chances are he is not alive after having disappeared six hours ago. My stomach groans with hunger, rations are in short supply and even with Kat's expert scrounging food is scarce. Wiersbowski and Kat are behind me, knowing that our small group is reduced yet again to three men. We at least owe it to him to find his body instead of letting it rot in the desert or, God forbid, turn into a zombie.  
  
We find him four hours later, as the sun begins to raise high in the noon sky. He is lying in a shallow wadi, there are several bite marks around his body and there is scant little flesh on his right forearm. He looks as though he has been served at a banquet, but it is his eyes that are ghastly. They are empty of the life within, but I can still feel the pure terror he must have felt as the Gollums dragged him across the desert and tossed him into a crowd of zombies. All of his ammunition is still on his body, indicating he was surprised without having fired a shot. I remove his magazines from his pouches and place them in my own. In the no-man's land you can never have too much ammunition. It is then that Fressan's corpse begins to move, as though it were subtly prodded with a stick.  
  
I am aghast at this sight; his eyes are dead still though his body moves. His face is a slack and mindless stare, where it once was frozen in terror, a veritable death mask. I raise my rifle as he advances towards me. I still find it hard to remember that all he sees of me is food and that the man that was once Fressan, the personality is gone and dead. One of my good friends at ACME, one of the three who accompanied me to the recruiting station to volunteer for the Army, is now among the walking dead. Despite this I find it surprisingly hard to shoot him. I remember being told by our battalion commander that we would encounter comrades who have turned into zombies and not hesitating to shoot them. "Believe me; you're doing them a favor." He said.  
  
I am horrified to see Fressan in this state; he was the ardent partier among our ranks, a man who would stay out until all hours at various clubs, a vital and alive individual. All of this is now gone as I stare at the zombie; Fressan is now a mere shell of himself, not dead but not truly alive either. My rifle is leveled, wavering.  
  
"Shoot him!" Sergeant McCron shouts, "God damn it Gallatin, shoot him!"  
  
At this harshly barked order my hesitation breaks and I open fire. The round goes right through Fressan's forehead, exiting out the back of his skull from five meters away. He falls to the ground, twitching at my feet. Sadly I pull one of his dog tags from his body.  
  
Atop the cliff, Wiersbowski puts a hand on my shoulder, "Fressan would have wanted us to that for him. Remember he said he would rather die than shamble across the dunes as a zombie."  
  
"Did anyone else die today?" I ask Wiersbowski.  
  
"Two more of the guys who enlisted with us from ACME back in the day." Wiersbowski replies, "Did you hear D'Arco joined the Rangers?"  
  
"No." I reply. Armand D'Arco was a lean, gentle natured Frenchman who worked at ACME with us. He was also two years too young to have joined the Army with us. The 4th and 2nd Ranger Battalions are the spearhead for a force preparing to come to our aid as we did for the Libyans, Egyptians and Sicilians fighting here.  
  
From the east, a new biohazard has broken out in Morocco. Soldiers of the 47th Tunisian Armored Division, 9th Algerian Light Infantry Division, and 17th Moroccan Infantry Division are fighting to contain it, and it is not believed to be serious. Still I do wish the Rangers would hurry up with their training and land in Africa, lending fresh troops to our battered and battle scarred veterans.  
  
We barely have returned to our own lines before a barrage ensues, throwing corpses airborne. An energy orb explodes by my side, throwing me and Wiersbowski into the air. I am thrown onto the desert floor and feel spreading warmth as well as both sharp and dull pains.  
  
I drift in and out of consciousness as I hear the call for "Medic!" from Wiersbowski, who is apparently not as badly injured as I.  
  
I hear voices around me, some of them are real, and others come from the depths of my mind, a mind wracked by shock, confusion and pain.  
  
"Staunch that blood flow." Pierce directs.  
  
"Wiersbowski, are you alright?" Kat asks.  
  
"Gallatin, can you hear me?" Sergeant McCron asks.  
  
"Get those stretchers over here, pronto!" Pierce yells.  
  
"Wiersbowski, can you walk?" Sergeant McCron asks.  
  
"Yeah sarge, but not very fast, my leg feels funny." Wiersbowski replies.  
  
It is quite a long time later before I regain some semblance of consciousness because I can see stars in the sky.  
  
"They're beautiful, aren't they?" Andi asks me.  
  
At first I think I am dead, because only the dead can see the dead. But the pressure dressings on my right arm and my right leg throb painfully and I am obviously alive, or clinging to the last vestiges of life.  
  
I feel myself start to fade, a young man shy of his twentieth birthday, but then I hear words from beyond.  
  
"Martin, I miss you, but people need you alive now." Andi says, her voice fading like fog before the rising sun.  
  
"It's not your time, brother." David, my younger brother says.  
  
"Please don't die Martin, it's not time for you yet. You have so much to experience." Andi pleads.  
  
And this alone forces my eyes open. I see myself in a hospital bed somewhere far from the front. I do not hear the sound of guns. I peer outside the window and do not see the North African desert, but rolling hills and dry scrub terrain. "Where am I?" I ask a medic.  
  
The medic, a sergeant with an uncharacteristically cherubic face and very likely not a combat medic, "You're in a hospital in Salerno."  
  
"How long was I out?" I ask.  
  
"At least a week. You came close to buying it soldier, welcome back." Sergeant Wade, the medic, replies.  
  
I see Wiersbowski sleeping soundly in the bed next to me. He has bandages around his forehead, numerous cuts and bruises and his arm in an elevated sling. My own arm is encased in plaster, as is my leg.  
  
An orderly walks by my bed to give me breakfast. I recognize him instantly, "Gavin?"  
  
The lean private turns towards me, "Martin? Are you feeling better?"  
  
"This young man has been coming by your bed every single day to check on you." Wade informs me.  
  
"An orderly, I volunteered for combat duty and they stick me as far away from the front as possible." Gavin replies.  
  
He doesn't know what he's asking for, seeing your friends die before your eyes, being subject to near constant attacks by inhuman floods of enemy soldiers across the no man's land, constant marches along the route of our former victories, and the sight of many cemeteries springing up on the desert like weeds in a choking lawn. Yet I understand why he wants to go to the front because his reason is the same as my own. Revenge, pure and simple revenge is his reason.  
  
I try to avoid talking of the current military situation here in the Mediterranean and Europe. Central Europe, France, Finland and Norway are either almost entirely overrun if not completely overrun by biohazards. The north of Italy is not immune as well as the 14th Swiss Infantry Division, and the 176th Italian Infantry Division are barely holding off the horrific invasion that has ravaged much of Switzerland and Germany and is spreading into the European Mediterranean. France is almost entirely overrun, Denmark and Sweden are barely holding out and the Balkan states are preparing for Operation Counterpunch, to take place in mid 2143. It is an offensive designed to contain and destroy the creatures ravaging Eastern Europe.  
  
All around me I see stunned, broken men, damaged and destroyed from the fighting going on around the world. I even see the patch of the 5th South American Brigade, a hodgepodge detachment of soldiers, most of them reservists and draftees from Argentina and Chile, sent to fight off the growing Biohazard infestation around the Amazon River area.  
  
The soldier whose patch bears this unit, one of a condor valiantly battling a multi-headed snake across a white background contained within a heraldic shield, is Private Hernan Castanza from Buenos Aires. He is a thirty year old gentleman with a small child and a wife who he relocated to Patagonia when the Biohazard struck South America last year.  
  
I finger a handful of dog tags in my pockets. The names of the men these once belonged to burned into my mind, Rhett Garland, "Pilgrim" Strauch, Michael Morerro, and Gerard Fressan. All of these men are now dead, strewn in makeshift graves across the North African desert at cemeteries belonging to the 15th Light Infantry Division.  
  
Gavin has walked out into the hallway; he is upset that I am so uncommunicative. I hear other voices just then, not merely of the six of us convalescents who share this room. I hear Zack and Ivy talking with Gavin and Brianna in the hall.  
  
I see the lot of them walk inside towards my sick bed. I imagine I must be a pathetic sight to them, a bandaged, broken man, and a survivor of a campaign in North Africa that is turning sour for the soldiers fighting it.  
  
I feel sorry for them for they have had to pass through the hospital to find me, seeing the maimed men from campaigns all around the world. I especially pity poor Brianna, for not only does she me in this state but she has also seen too soon the effects of war. She also sees men that will never be whole again because of this great plague upon mankind.  
  
I gaze upon them with sad and knowing eyes, especially seeing Brianna, she is growing to resemble Andi and this alone tugs my spirits down. She gives me a get well soon card and I open it. The contents nearly bring tears to my eyes as I weep unashamedly in front of fellow soldiers. In a frame of lace and home made artwork is a picture of Andi at her high school prom with me in uniform.  
  
"Andi worried about you every day." Brianna says, "She checked the newspaper's casualty reports and went to the information kiosk on campus at noon just to make sure you were alright."  
  
"I remember the day that they reported you missing and possibly dead. Andi wouldn't leave her room for a whole day until we found out you were still alive." Gavin replied.  
  
"She would have wanted you to move on with your life Martin." Ivy replies.  
  
What life do they mean? Certainly life on the front is not what they mean. I'm going to fight to the bitter end, the Army and my unit will see to that. I may not even be alive when I return to the front.  
  
There is a long and uncomfortable silence, "Do you ever feel that Andi's still with us?"  
  
My grief bubbles under my implacable façade, as Gavin continues, "Yesterday I sent a letter home addressed to her. Right after I sent it, I realized that she's no longer with us."  
  
"Just say dead for God's sake if you're going to bring it up!" I reply sharply.  
  
"Martin, I know it hurts." Gavin replies.  
  
"Burn in hell!" I shout, "You don't know how much it hurts! My love for her gave me knowledge that I had something other than survival to look forward to. Now all I have is vengeance!"  
  
In uncharacteristic anger Gavin replies, "You ungrateful bastard! She was my sister too. I know she was a lover to you and that you loved her deeply but imagine my grief on knowing that a sweet and innocent girl is dead. I cannot avenge her. You know what my drill sergeant said during basic, 'Private Ryvers' inept weapon's handling, poor attention to detail, and inability to master basic soldiering renders him fit to rear echelon work.' I want to fight! I want to avenge her!"  
  
This softens my rage as I reply, "Put in a transfer, and ask for Sergeant Dibernardo, weapon's platoon on Sicily, he should help you brush up your weapons skills and get you transferred to a combat zone and the infantry. If you can't get North Africa, I would recommend Europe or the Pacific, you don't want to wind up in the South American theater."  
  
"I know that, I see a lot of the wounded that come here from various theaters. I remember one poor lad who was missing his left arm at the shoulder and his leg had to be broken back into place." Gavin replies, "Thank you Martin, I'll leave you to your rest."  
  
And so he does and I remain at my sickbed for now. I idly watch the news of the North African theater. We are fighting a steady withdrawal along the King's Highway, exchanging fire with fierce rearguard actions. We fortify various towns along the way while the rearguard delays the opposing contingents. It is a brilliant strategy, but from my experience it is a telling drain on manpower and resources of Army Corps Africa.  
  
Wiersbowski, Kat, and myself are the only original Africans of No. 4 Barracks alive now where there were once seven of us. I look at all of the men in the room now. Of those of us that heal and are sent to the front again, how many of us will emerge alive and whole from this cruel conflict? 


	9. King's Highway

King's Highway  
  
Disclaimer: Same as before.  
  
June 2142: Wiersbowski recovered a month earlier than I. Recovery was pretty slow, and painful, but I have recovered as well and will be sent to my old unit again. I lazily watch the clouds of sand the truck kicks up as it ferries me and several replacements to the 15th Light Infantry's positions.  
  
I recovered all of my old gear from the storehouse. Kat made sure my pistol didn't get taken, and it's on my web gear. I look at the replacements, tight faced young boys dragged too quickly from mama's skirt into hell. They are fresh faced, clean shaven, in freshly issued desert yellow fatigues that have yet to fade into the almost white shade that most of the old hands' uniforms have faded into.  
  
Much has changed in North Africa since I was wounded. We have been driven entirely out of Egypt and any chance of linking up with the Middle Eastern Corps is for naught. As it is, we are barely holding out in countless rearguard actions, fighting and dying in ditches and foxholes along the Old King's Highway across the North African coast.  
  
I see Kat and Wiersbowski sitting behind their machinegun in a foxhole near the edge of the road and join them. We barely exchange any greetings. Out of a remaining sense of pity we try to teach the new recruits all that we have learned in two years of vicious desert fighting. We teach them the importance of camouflage, of how to distinguish mirages from actual sights, how to throw hand grenades so they explode a half second from hitting the ground, and not to cluster together at any air raid or bombardment.  
  
Our ultimate objective is to retreat into the Tunisian highlands and form a hedgehog defense, much like the Afrika Korps of old. We are retreating along the Old King's Highway in a bitter struggle from crater to crater. Our trench lines in Egypt and the Libyan frontier have been shot to pieces for quite some time and our main army is retreating. The 15th Light Infantry Division and the 115th Libyan Infantry Division are fighting the vast majority of this rear guard action with the 3rd Egyptian Armored Division using its tanks as a mobile reserve to delay any enemy armored thrusts.  
  
Once we get to the Tunisian mountains, we can hold out almost indefinitely by burrowing into the caves and resisting any major enemy thrusts. Crater to crater, road to road, day by day, we retreat, fighting all the while across the Libyan frontier. We now form an elastic line of defense. Whenever we are hit, we withdraw, fighting all the while as the armored units attack and encircle the enemy spearheads. This tactic seems to be working, but we are being steadily pushed back. Our elastic defense also kills a lot of soldiers.  
  
Our fresh troops are little more than anemic boys who barely can carry a pack and know very little except how to die in great numbers. I witnessed two squads of them get wiped out in a massive zombie attack, because they didn't know to fall back under covering fire of their mates and get messily devoured as a result by swarms of the undead. I could hear their screams well into the night from my post. I called in artillery on that position and got four shells, because the batteries are starting to ration their ammunition. Intensive fighting is going on all around the Mediterranean. Northern Spain and Portugal, our initial source of fresh recruits, are under heavy attack and barely holding enemy forces in the mountainous border with France. They can no longer supply us with men.  
  
Britain and Ireland are husbanding their troops for the defense of their island nations. Most of Algeria has been taken over by the Biohazard and the force of the Biohazard is reclaiming almost all of the territory we conquered. Our orders now consist of holding Tunisia and waiting for a double-edged sword from Egypt and from the Algerian coast to come and rescue us.  
  
Great phalanxes of ogres and swarms of scorpions charge across the no- man's land. We retreat backward only so far and use specialized anti-tank squads to dual the great arachnids while our infantry fights off their infantry escort. By the hundreds our dead are buried in simple graves along the Old King's Highway. The British road through the desert is becoming known by old hands of Army Corps Africa as the Highway of Death.  
  
Our machinegun sweeps in a great arc across the front of the shell crater we now occupy. A row of zombies falls to our shooting, but more keep coming. Kat fires the machinegun constantly, the barrel glows white hot. One of the recruits helps Kat change out the barrel as Wiersbowski keeps firing his Wraith cannon into the attacking horde. My own rifle is firing constantly into the ranks of the undead clamoring before us. It goes empty again and I pull my pistol from my web gear and keep firing.  
  
We are not beaten, for as soldiers we are more experienced, we are merely crushed under a great and overwhelming mass of enemy troops. For every hungry and wretched soldier of Army Corps Africa, there is at least ten of the enemy. For every tank or armored vehicle there are at least ten scorpions. For every creature that we kill, at least ten more of the infected take its place.  
  
Again we retreat, our position has become untenable and this stretch of the King's Highway now belongs to the enemy. All we have done is bought time for more soldiers of Army Corps Africa to retreat further back into Tunisia where we are prepared to make our final stand.  
  
I see an energy orb obliterate five new recruits on my right flank. The impact jars the helmet from the top of my head and I see Andi's picture inside it. It fails to bring me the courage and inspiration it once did. It only serves to bring me pain and a deepening hatred of these loathsome things that were once human beings. It brings me hate for I knew these things took my beloved Andi away from me.  
  
As soldiers we are very well disciplined and can make ad hoc combat groups consisting of survivors from other units. Being one of only eight survivors from a forty-man platoon, this is where Wiersbowski, Kat, and myself find ourselves. I see another soldier get dragged over a dune by a dozen decaying hands. I throw a grenade over the dune as I hear the zombies start eating him alive. The explosion kills several of them, tossing blood and viscera over the dune, splashing the shaken survivors protecting this wadi.  
  
I cannot help but wonder as I look at my greatly reduced circle of friends. How many of us will be left in the days to come? How many more of my generation will this war kill off?  
  
The desert sun fiercely blazes in the sapphire blue sky over the sandy expanse of the desert. It is almost a beautiful sight, were it not littered with corpses, shell craters, and the burned out wreckage of vehicles and aircraft, markers of a failed campaign to remind the living of the hell that they currently inhabit.  
  
The salt sea air blowing in from the coast less than three miles away smells sweetest when not mingled with the scent of death, decay, and smoke from the battlefield. Another barrage falls in our sector. We crouch down wishing our foxholes were a few feet deeper, or that we had the concrete bunkers and pillboxes we struggled to hold in Egypt and the Libyan frontier.  
  
Then it ends and again we find ourselves fighting another attacking band of ogres advancing towards our position. We fight it out as long as we can, again the moments blur together as our machinegun rips swaths through the enemy ranks and Wiersbowski sprays several of them with bursts of 20mm fire. Grenades are simply wonderful in this situation as I throw them with wild abandon into the ranks of the ogres and firing my rifle and pistol when I find no more grenades to throw.  
  
Then suddenly three large scorpions scuttle over the dunes towards our positions. We know that our hold on this particular stretch of the Old King's Highway is untenable. From a mockery these giant arachnids have become a crushing, terrifying form of death. Our personal arms are matchsticks against their chitin exoskeletons and our grenades are mere firecrackers. We know the order of the day is to retreat yet again. At least with zombies, ogres, or Gollums we could see that our foes were once human.  
  
This is not so with the scorpions or wasps. They are more terrifying versions of creatures that already are pests to humanity. How ironic to flee from something I once swatted with rolled up newspapers before 2142.  
  
We young men are lost boys now. We are hailed as heroes and men of iron, but what sane man would keep such a view if he were to see the soldiers on the frontline. We are little more than hungry, wretched beggars, our uniforms worn ragged, our eyes sunken into our heads.  
  
There are rumors that DeRutyer wants to plan a counteroffensive after the relief force invading through Algeria in October comes through. The possibility of us undertaking offensive action in our current state is laughable. The 115th Libyan Infantry Division exists in name only. It's soldiers are either shambling about the dunes as part of the horde of the undead, broken bodies in hospitals, or buried in countless cemeteries across the Old King's Highway.  
  
The 15th Light Infantry Division is on the verge of destruction. I have received a promotion to Sergeant and am in charge of our small group of twelve infantrymen holding a ditch along the Old King's Highway.  
  
For nearly two months they have been steadily pushing us back. Sergeant McCron was killed nearly three weeks earlier, and it is his stripes I now wear. A crimson head leapt over a dune while we were struggling to hold yet another roadside ditch and started to tear him apart before we in turn started to shoot this crimson head into fragments with concentrated gunfire.  
  
The 9th Sicilian Infantry Division is rotated to the front and we are relegated to the rear. We are merely given a few days rest, but it is certainly a lot less miserable an existence than that which we eked out fighting to delay an enemy advance. The Sicilians have that responsibility now and I do not pity them.  
  
A letter arrives from the world that I no longer inhabit. It is a world who's tender embrace war's desolation violently tore me away from. Like Persephone's violent abduction by Hades in Greek mythology my generation and me were torn away from the kind nurturing worlds we knew and cast into the very depths of Hell itself. The letter tells me that Zack has been drafted and has been sent to join the 1st Infantry Division in its assault on North Africa.  
  
How many? That is all that I ask. How many more of our young must be violently torn from nurture and love into violence and hate like I have been? How many of our young must die before we finally sing Non Nobis, finally signifying the destruction of the undead scourge. Earth shall be bled white and empty before this plague is finally stopped and destroyed.  
  
I know that no corner of Earth, even if it does not know the shamble of zombie feet, will escape unscathed by this Biohazard. Already in many a household across Earth folded United Systems flags are in the window, representing sons and even daughters killed in the fighting or even on the home front.  
  
I am dirty, tired, bloodied and exhausted. So are the men around me. We are victims of months and years of savage desert fighting. As part of the reserve division forming the rear guard we march to the sound of guns. The Egyptians have done what they can and I notice their numbers have significantly shrunk.  
  
Yesterday I saw a soldier coughing out his life from a chest wound. He was not from my unit. He was a youth from the 9th Sicilian Infantry. I was closest to him and as the chaplain read him his last rites I held the dying boy's hand. I could feel his thin fingers gripping my hand like a death grip. Almost as suddenly, I feel the grip tighten and then slack, the pale hand limp. Yet another boy has been sacrificed on the altar in order to protect Earth from the scourge of the Biohazard.  
  
The last look in the dying boy's eyes told me this, "Remember."  
  
That I will try to do. If I remain alive at the end of this great tribute to madness I will do so. Rest easy my son, and should you meet Andi in the afterlife, tell her to wait for me under the shade tree. I do not know what hour I shall arrive, but in all probabilities it shall be soon.  
  
"He today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother." -Henry V, St. Crispian's Speech. 


	10. St Crispin's Day

Saint Crispin's Day  
  
Disclaimer: Same as before. William Shakespeare wrote the St. Crispin's Day speech that inspires a majority of this writing.  
  
~ ~ ~ ~  
  
October 25, 2142: Months of fighting from crater to crater are taking their toll. They pushed us steadily westward and we now hold a section of the Old King's Highway in the center of Libya.  
  
Wiersbowski fell today on this day, St. Crispin's Day. A Gollum shot him in the stomach with a Verey light. He lived for over an hour in terrible pain as Pierce tried to vainly staunch the flow of blood. Alas he could only spend a few minutes on Wiersbowski as more casualties were flooding in.  
  
It was at that moment where Kat and I knew that Wiersbowski was going to die. With bloodied and trembling lips Wiersbowski spat out a quote I never shall forget, "He that outlives this day, and comes safe home, Will stand a tip-toe when the day is named, And rouse him at the name of Crispian."  
  
"Henry V, my friend." I say to him as I move closer with my canteen, to give him water even though he will be dead shortly.  
  
"Funny, all those Shakespeare quotes you used to throw around, the ones only Andi really understood." Wiersbowski says, he is becoming lucid from shock and trauma, "Take my canteen, there's still some water in there."  
  
I do so, handing it off to Kat. "You write my girlfriend, tell her I died like a man."  
  
"No one's gonna have to write her, you'll make it out of this." I reply, even as I form the words I know that they are untrue and that Specialist Wiersbowski is doomed.  
  
"Don't you bullshit me!!!" He shouts.  
  
He carries on for a few more moments and we see his eyes roll back into his head, his breathing become labored, and finally he dies with his last breath. In a rage I throw several grenades at an attacking crowd of zombies even though our machinegun would have killed them before they were even a threat.  
  
Will I even live to the next day of St. Crispin? I do not know, the odds are slim with the savage fighting going on all around me. Our seven man group that left No. 4 Barracks a year ago is reduced to two. Of the batch of ACME detectives that joined the service alongside me, I am the only one still living.  
  
The desert in front of my eyes shimmers as the midday sun reflects off of it. The tarp covering our foxhole is barely suitable shade and certainly useless if an energy orb were to fall on top of it. We have beaten back yet another attack but at the cost of another death. I take Wiersbowski's dog tag and put it inside my pocket in company with several more that I had removed from friends throughout my years in Africa.  
  
The shooting stops for a short time and the guns are silent for now. But for how long? The silence is eerie on the front line whenever the shooting ceases. It only means a temporary lull in the fighting. From experience I quickly reload both my weapons and check my ammunition in my squad. I give the Wraith cannon to a soldier whose rifle was broken by an ogre's sword. He hands me his rifle ammunition and I give him Wiersbowski's ammunition and grenades.  
  
Every day on the Old King's Highway is marked by nearly constant shooting, for somewhere on our rearguard positions are engaged by enemy forces. The shooting on the frontline rarely ceases altogether and this means that a very large assault is to be expected.  
  
The assault in question suddenly materializes as a phalanx of zombies shamble into our position. Our machinegun mows them down like grass and it becomes apparent that the zombies were merely expendable pawns to draw our fire; suddenly a massive ogre charge ensues. I put our Wraith gunner on that threat and add my own rifle fire and the firepower of two more riflemen on it. Soon I can no longer hold this crater and carrying Wiersbowski's body, we fall back to another crater further to the rear while another group of soldiers in a ditch add their own gunfire to the attacking mob. Grenades are thrown to cover our retreat.  
  
Always we are engaging and retreating, entangled in a bitter struggle from crater to crater. And always we are retreating, forced back in the end not by better soldiers, but by the sheer numbers of our enemies. As soldiers we are of far higher quality, but we are merely overwhelmed by the great numbers that the attacking horde can bring to bear.  
  
If we ever return home, we will be a generation shorn of hope, weary, broken, and forever scarred by our experiences of seeing friends and loved ones dying anywhere. Should I still be alive at the end of this war and return to ACME, I will find that a lot of the places I had seen around the world are all but destroyed, ravaged by the terror of the Biohazard. Paris, Rome, Bucharest, and Berlin are four cities that I visited on my first assignments as an ACME detective. They are all ravaged by the terror of the Biohazard.  
  
Andi, whom I loved so deeply, was violently taken away from me in this conflict as well as my youngest brother. I fight on to avenge them, but even that fails to lift my spirits. The war has broken me. I will fight on because my superiors will see to that.  
  
Our newest soldiers are anemic young boys who should be slapped on the wrist and lead away from this insanity. Our veterans are little older, we are cynical, lethargic, burned out men that resist only to survive and because we are ordered to fight. We once marched under proud and valiant standards of our respective units. Now we are weary and numb. The 15th Light Infantry Division is almost bled completely white. Any delays we inflict or attacks we drive off are Pyrrhic victories. Not a day goes by where I don't see or hear a name of someone I know, or someone I served with either being carted off to hospitals further to the rear or buried in shallow graves that form our cemeteries. One could easily mark the rout of the 15th Light Infantry Division by the dozens of unit cemeteries along the Old King's Highway.  
  
Saint Crispin's feast day is marked by little more than bombardment and attack. "Then he will strip his sleeve and show his scars." It was a famous line from my favorite Shakespearean play though Andi preferred Much Ado About Nothing. I bear too many scars of this desert war. My scars are many, old battle wounds some minor but including scars from wounds that nearly took my life months ago, emotional scars, the loss of my loved ones.  
  
Will I ever survive to the next St. Crispin's Day or will Crispin Crispian find me buried in a shallow grave in the North African desert or shambling about the dunes as a zombie? I know should I survive I will, "Remember with advantages of what feats I did that day."  
  
What feats I did that day? I held the hand of a dying friend whose blood spilled like water upon the desert sands. I dodged death in its many guises and led yet another retreat, giving ground on this shell cratered and corpse strewn stretch of road. Even if King Henry V himself were in this crater, would he be so brash as to tell we few, we remaining men, we band of desperate survivors that, "He who sheds his blood with me today shall be my brother."  
  
I must be hallucinating, for in the mirage I see a solitary figure. As it draws closer, I see that it is a woman, her light brown hair teased by the hot desert breeze. I see her gray eyes as she draws closer. She is standing at her full height, as if this great and bloody siege upon Crispin Crispian is not occurring.  
  
I know that she doesn't exist, for she died a long time ago. She was from another world that I shall never again see. I have some faith that the landings in Algeria and Morocco will make it to the savagely beaten remnants of Army Corps Africa. It is only through the iron discipline, what remnant of pride we have, and sheer desperation that we are even able to hold the lines. We are too hungry, too wretched to carry out offensive action. I saw a young soldier keel over from sheer exhaustion on this day of Crispin Crispian. He died a few hours later in an overcrowded aid station to the rear.  
  
What sane man would wish to be at this battle upon Saint Crispin's Day? We in Africa are lauded as valiant warriors, as the few, the happy few, the band of brothers. A battered copy of Henry V is in my field pack, read on many a desert night. It is a precious gift from someone beloved but dead.  
  
I am too tired, too worn, too hungry, and defeated to cry but I feel pain after having lost Andi. My drive to avenge her death can only drive me so far. Every creature I kill, every bullet I fire, every grenade I throw I feel that much farther removed from the innocent boy that I was when I joined the Army. I am twenty years old. What little of life do I know but death, destruction, and valor?  
  
"We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.." My band of brothers is now reduced to myself and Kat. The other five of us are now gone, scattered across the desert in division cemeteries belonging to the 15th Light Infantry Division.  
  
I kill these fiends, throwing grenades and firing bullets with reckless abandon at the large mass of creatures attacking us again. I fight with a valiant despair, wanting only to kill these abominations responsible for the deaths of my brother and my beloved.  
  
The attack breaks by our grenades and shells. I see a wounded Gollum, its legs shot away by our machinegun, trying to crawl away. I shoot it in the stomach with my pistol, leaving it to die a slow and painful death on the dunes.  
  
My emotions flow from wistfulness to sadness, from rage to mania. War does not ennoble men. It turns them into dogs, poisons the soul. I know nothing can bring Andi and David back into my arms but killing those creatures provides a form of release.  
  
Will I live to old age? I doubt that. A zombie shambles into view. I can tell by the fatigues he was an old hand of Army Corps Africa. He comes forth towards me as I lead my men to yet another crater, as our position has become untenable yet again. It comes so close I can smell the scent of death. He hasn't decayed yet, but he is stiff after many hours of death.  
  
A large hole and lacerated viscera marks where his stomach once had been. I know that shell of a man, was once Specialist Wiersbowski. This creature that had been a dying young man that was among my close friends even before I enlisted. Sadly I know my duty, raise my rifle, aim and fire two shots into his head.  
  
Wiersbowski's zombified corpse collapses on the dunes, once again a sack of dead and dying cells. The brain of the creature is now dead and it no longer can threaten us. I shall remember with far too many advantages what I did on this day of Crispin. 


	11. Mareth Line

Mareth Line  
  
Disclaimer: Same as before.  
  
~ ~ ~ ~  
  
January 2143: A new year, shorn entirely of hope as Morocco and Tunisia have yet to be pacified before the relief column comes to our aid. Spearhead by the 2nd and 4th Ranger Battalions, the relief column is fighting some serious opposition.  
  
We have fortified a section of the old Mareth Line, an ancient twentieth century fortification the French built to withstand an Italian invasion of Tunisia. This is what our fierce fighting through Libya brought us. Army Corps Africa's engineering detachments, working night and day, constructed trenches, interlocking tunnels to caves, pill boxes, and bunkers to form a twenty-two mile long barrier perpendicular to the enemy axis of advance.  
  
The 15th Light Infantry Division is ordered to man the forward observation posts of the Mareth Line. As the Light Infantry, that is our role, to act as skirmishers in large battles, scouts for offensives, and as a delaying force on the defensive.  
  
I man a two person machinegun post with a zigzagging trench connecting to an artillery observer pit. The trench also connects several supporting rifle pits for my twelve man squad.  
  
Kat and I man the machinegun post on the first watch, scanning the dunes, ever wary of attacks that may hurl themselves like waves against rocky shoals against the Mareth Line. We are flanked by the 13e DBLE, the vaunted Demi-Brigade of the Colonial Legion.  
  
They are tough, tanned, and often bearded soldiers, hardened by nearly four years of harsh fighting. When I was a new recruit, we used to mock the legionnaires who shared camp with us at El Agheila because they suffered decimating defeats, retreating all the way from our outermost colony in space at Lacerta all the way to Earth.  
  
As the desert campaign wore on, we grew to respect these experienced, battle toughened warriors. Scars and tattoos crisscross their arms, reminders of previous campaigns marked by tragedy and death. Their eyes, imbedded in their lean, narrow faces are not those of frightened boys pulled roughly from their mother's skirts. Their eyes are jaded, almost feral; they carry the looks of men who have stared death in the eye many a time.  
  
The legionnaires man a machinegun nest about three hundred yards to our front and to the right. Our positions are reinforced by these jaded veterans of war. They are men that make Kat and I look like mere boys.  
  
An attack comes violently out of the dunes towards their position. Because of bad placement, we can't fire without risking hitting our own troops. We can only watch helplessly and take what cover we can.  
  
I urge my men to ready themselves as the legionnaires manning the rifle pits fire round after round with violent intensity, eventually fighting the tide of charging ogres hand to hand. First one of the two man rifle pits falls to offensive action, then another, and then a third and the fourth rifle pit falls back to its machinegun nest.  
  
From that nest, four legionnaires attempt to resist a charge of at the minimum a reinforced platoon of ogres. The savage beasts come charging the machinegun nest, keeping pressure on the gunner until his barrel glows white hot.  
  
The machine gunner grabs his pistol and keeps fighting. But with their machinegun gone and a large force of ogres launching a massive assault the outcome can only be slaughter. Even in death, the legionnaires are stoic and defiant. I watch one of the surviving men using his broken rifle as a club. Without even an afterthought, five ogres break ranks and gang up on this solitary legionnaire. He falls against five of their swords stabbing through his body repeatedly. An ogre strikes the side of his head with a stave and a stream of blood gushes out into the sand.  
  
"Fire! Fire! Everybody! Now!" I shout as we pour a torrent of gunfire into the ranks of the ogres.  
  
I throw two grenades into their ranks and see several bloodied corpses fall out. Gradually I see the first rifle pit fall. An ogre clubs one of the new recruits in the back of his head, spilling blood and brains upon the sand. I fire two rounds into the ogre's head. The second rifleman is impaled through the back by a sword. Kat sweeps the machinegun barrel from side to side. I hear a cry of pain and see Kat trying to fight off an ogre that has gored him with its sword.  
  
"Take that you son of a bitch!!!" I shout and empty six rounds from my pistol at point blank into it's green, orcish face.  
  
"Fall back!" I shout loudly.  
  
Over the radio I shout, "Fire support, fire for effect!"  
  
Artillery shells crash down upon our position as we retreat. "The aid station is not too far." I reassure Kat as I duck behind a rocky outcropping and bandage his wound.  
  
Counter battery fire from the enemy follows close on our heels and shards of rock and metal are just as dangerous if not more so than the actually explosions. I wait in the rocks until I no longer hear the shelling and lift Kat over my back.  
  
He is heavy, and hard to lift, but I know I must get him to the stretcher bearers and from there he will be carried to the hospital. "It's not much farther Kat."  
  
Kat groans in reply, his eyes are half closed, as if he stands at the threshold between death and life. I have seen many a dying man in such a state. It is a clear sign that the dying man has surrendered to the abyss.  
  
A blast knocks me off my feet, I am uninjured and force myself to keep on running out of sheer and utter desperation.  
  
"Kat, wake up!" I shout, "You'll make it."  
  
I am almost desperate to believe my own lies. Kat has suffered massive loss of blood. "C'mon, it's only half a kilometer to the aid station. They'll be able to help you!"  
  
My face is wet with exhaustion and tears, for I know that the half choked lies are not true and that the end lies near. At last I see the aid tent and run towards it yelling, "Medic!" like a madman.  
  
A harried, bloodied medical sergeant runs up to me. "Are you related?" he asks.  
  
"What? No!" I shout, "This man needs help, urgently!"  
  
"You might have spared yourself the trouble." The orderly replies, "He is stone dead."  
  
"Fainted." I reply swiftly, "I was talking to him not more than a few minutes ago."  
  
"He is dead." The orderly replies.  
  
I feel Kat's hands. They are warm. I go to run his temples and feel wetness on my hand. I withdraw my fingers to find them bloody. On my way to the aid station, a splinter must have struck him in the head. A small hole in the side of his head, but it sufficed.  
  
Do I still walk? Do I have limbs still? I feel intact as I walk about. All is proceeding as normal, only Corporal Kaczynski Stanislaus of Geneva is dead. This I know and nothing else as I trudge back to my unit. 


	12. Wadi Akarit

Wadi Akarit  
  
Disclaimer: Same as before.  
  
~ ~ ~ ~  
  
April 2143: We have been pushed back from the Mareth Line to our reserve defenses in the Tunisian hills at the Wadi Akarit. Never had life seemed so precious to me as in the summer of 2143. The vast empty terrain of North Africa is only broken by the cemeteries which Graves Registration buries our dead. Still more litter the no-man's land, only to rise again as zombies or even crimson heads if improperly disposed of.  
  
Spring of 2143 was when life was most appreciated. Never before has simply being alive meant anything to me. Never before have had I felt more thankful that I bear a full set of limbs, that I still draw breath, and that I live to see the copper disk of the sun rising over the dunes of the North African desert.  
  
Spring 2143 while the dying continues unabated. Never before have I seen such gruesome displays of death. Time and again I see bodies flung into the sky by explosions, I see men transfixed by ogre's blades or eaten while kicking and struggling by hordes of zombies. We inflict tremendous casualties on our attackers, downing them in droves with machineguns, blasting them into shards with artillery, mortar, air strike, and grenade, and with concentrated rifle fire.  
  
There are but five men remaining in my squad. We receive no more reinforcement, our task is simply to hold out until our relief column clears Algeria and breaks through into Tunisia. This is to happen far from my position here at the Wadi Akarit. This rendezvous is to be at Kasserine Pass.  
  
I duck deep into my machinegun nest as more energy orbs explode around me. The barrage lasts for twenty minutes on end, explosions throwing geysers of earth, flesh, and shrapnel skyward. My helmet is again knocked from my head by the next blast wave. I see Andi's smiling face, so close yet so far away. She was cruelly taken away from me by this same foe that is lavishing shells upon our positions.  
  
The battered remnants of Army Corps Africa are fighting on very few supplies, with fuel running low. Yesterday yet again, after taking all the parts out of a truck we had to blow it up with hand grenades. Our machinegun has only three 250 round belts issued to it on a daily basis. I have to save ammunition for an actual assault. Thus I tell my gunner not to fire until he is absolutely sure he can hit his targets and to fire in controlled bursts.  
  
That's an awful lot to tell a frightened 17 year old boy and he often shoots like there is no tomorrow. I always tell him, fire in short bursts, save our ammunition. He is tethered to that machinegun like it is his only salvation and emptying entire belts into attacking waves is the only way to save his life.  
  
We salvage what ammunition and supplies we can from corpses of zombified soldiers and with our dwindling stockpiles, every round, every grenade, every drop of water is more precious than jewels and diamonds.  
  
Yesterday I saw another post get overwhelmed. They were completely isolated by swarms of zombies with ogres and Gollums dwindling their numbers. I heard their last survivors call in artillery on their coordinates and saw three 90mm howitzer rounds land in their midst, killing the three surviving soldiers out of a group of twelve, and most of their attackers.  
  
Our guns are worn almost to an unserviceable state by constant overuse. Danger from our own artillery is almost as likely as danger from their artillery. Today I saw one of our soldiers, a new recruit, caught like a deer in the headlights in the midst of a barrage. A shell that fell short of its target exploded fifteen yards in front of him. A cloud of shrapnel meant for the charge of ogres that followed the enemy barrage struck him full force and the razor edged fragments tore his body into four bloody chunks.  
  
Our relief force is defeating the enemy in the face of ferocious opposition, but will they reach the Wadi Akarit in time? I think not. Much of Europe has fallen, and the Sicilians are particularly demoralized as Sicily fell towards the end of 2142.  
  
Spring 2143, the smell of mowed grass, the time I never had to sleep with one eye open all the time. Those days are as far away as my deceased beloved. I am worn almost ragged. I have seen enough death, enough dying to last me through the ending of eternity.  
  
I am very quiet, let the years come; they can take nothing away from me that I haven't already lost. I am so alone, so forlorn that I can face them without fear. The fire of life I had within is dying to its embers. I stand up. Let the years come and take me away. I have nothing left to fear. 


	13. Epilogue

Epilogue  
  
He fell on April 2143 on a day that was so quiet and still in the North African desert. It was a day so silent and still in the African theater that the Army report from his sector of the front line confined itself to one single sentence, "Relief column has broken through, the Guns of October are silent."  
  
When his body was turned over by soldiers from the 1st Infantry Division they could see he had not suffered long. The look on his face was so peaceful and serene, almost glad that the end had come. 


End file.
